According to the Times:

At its core, the official said, the argument the Israelis make is that once the Iranians get an “impregnable breakout capability” — that is, a place that is protected from a military strike — “it makes no difference whether it will take Iran six months or a year or five years” to fabricate a nuclear weapon, he said.

The Americans have a very different view, according to a second senior official who has discussed the concept with Israelis. He said “there are many other options” to slow Iran’s march to a completed weapon, like shutting off Iran’s oil revenues, taking out facilities that supply centrifuge parts or singling out installations where the Iranians would turn the fuel into a weapon.

The article points out that disagreement between the U.S. and Israel on this issue is inevitable, given Israel’s geographic proximity to Iran (also, that whole ‘wipe Israel off the map’ thing).

In November, Tablet addressed the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, with Anshel Pfeffer asking Will They? and Austin Long asking Can They? Pfeffer argued:

The decision to go to war with Iran is not a political one. It is one of the few issues that transcends Israel’s left-right divide. Benny Begin and Moshe Yaalon, two of the most hardline right-wing ministers in the “Octet Forum,” the Israeli Cabinet’s main decision-making body, are currently opposed to an attack because they believe a military strike will cause a massive backlash from Iran and its proxies and should only be a very last resort. The motives of Netanyahu and Barak are more personal and historical than ideological. The prime minister, the son of a historian, views the Iranian issue through the prism of Jewish survival. In his view, safeguarding Israel against a nuclear threat is the generation’s duty, which has fallen to him. As leader of the opposition, from 2006 to 2009, Netanyahu constantly compared Iran to Germany circa 1938 and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. As prime minister, he has refrained from this terminology but his perspective remains unchanged.

U.S. and Israel Split on Speed of Iran Threat [NYT]
Related: Will They? [Tablet Magazine]
Can They?
Rationale
Earlier: The Iranian Tipping Point Approaches

In December 2010, together with some 30 Israeli defense and political journalists, I boarded a bus that took us to a building on the top of a hill overlooking Glilot junction, five miles north of Tel Aviv. We had come to Mossad headquarters for a meeting with Dagan, who was then the head of the agency. It was supposed to be an off-the-record briefing. But this being Israel, within hours after the meeting ended, most of what Dagan told us was on the Web and in the papers.

What he said was shocking. The Mossad chief told us that Iran would obtain nuclear warheads by 2014 at the earliest, and thus, he argued, there was no need for an Israeli military strike for the time being. Dagan’s claim ran directly counter to the public line of Israel’s defense establishment: that Iran would obtain the bomb much sooner.

Since that meeting more than a year ago, Dagan has been on a crusade to stop Israel from launching an imminent military strike against Iran. He has reiterated the argument that he laid out to us in Mossad headquarters—against a strike and in favor of sanctions and covert operations—at various public events and private conversations over the past year. And though Dagan is no longer head of Mossad, his view carries tremendous weight: His perspective on a possible Israeli strike is shared by many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers and Israel’s security establishment.

Dagan’s campaign has enraged Barak and Netanyahu, who accuse him of undermining Israeli deterrence. Barak and Netanyahu support an Israeli military strike in the near future, and for the past few months, with increasing intensity, they have tried to create the impression that they are considering such an attack this year.

Which view will prevail? At stake is the future of Israel, the lives of Iranians and Israelis, the supply of oil to the United States and the West, and the stability of the whole Middle East.

***

The roots of the tension within the highest level of Israel’s political-military leadership go back nearly five years, when Barak, Dagan, and the rest of the Cabinet were faced with the delicate question of whether to bomb Syria’s nuclear reactor in the Dir al-Zur region. In summer 2007, the Cabinet, led by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, deliberated behind closed doors to discuss the assessments of Mossad and Israeli military intelligence of a big structure that Syria was secretly building near the Euphrates River. The undisputed conclusion was that Syria was constructing a reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs and that the plans for the reactor had been provided by North Korea.

The Cabinet’s overwhelming decision was to order the Israeli air force to launch a military strike before radioactive materials would be introduced and it would be too late. Barak was the most senior Cabinet member to oppose the idea, and he argued that Israel could wait a few more months. Olmert, then-Chief of Staff General Gabi Ashkenazi, Dagan, and other Cabinet ministers were astonished to hear it. They suspected that Barak had a hidden agenda motivated by his own ambition to be prime minister. That summer, Barak and the Cabinet knew that within three or four months the findings of an inquiry commission investigating the 2006 Lebanon war would be released. They expected the commission would blame Olmert for major failures of the war, and thus he would be forced to resign. Barak hoped to replace him.

Over the course of a few weeks, Barak realized that he was in unsplendid isolation. Ultimately, he decided to join his Cabinet colleagues in approving the attack. (The Cabinet voted 13 to 1 to approve the attack. Avi Dichter, then minister of homeland security, opposed it.) In September 2007, eight U.S.-made Israeli F-16 fighter planes destroyed Syria’s nuclear ambitions when they bombed the reactor.

Barak’s behavior during that process caused Dagan and other military leaders to lose their faith in him. As one senior official put it, “If he zigzagged then, what assures us that his motives this time are pure?” Indeed, three years ago in private conversation, Barak opposed a military strike by Israel against Iran. So, what made him change his mind? It’s not clear. One possibility is that he wants to please Netanyahu in the hopes that the prime minister will take him aboard Likud and reinstate him in the Defense Ministry after the next elections, which are set for November 2013 but most likely will be sooner.

Continue reading: ‘When the sword is on our neck’

The administration has already begun to respond via Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who has offered Israel a balm with the words, “If they proceed and we get intelligence that they’re proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon then we will take whatever steps are necessary to stop it,” along with the pushback that the U.S. believes Iran is at least a year away from developing a nuclear weapon (and would then require an additional year or two to make it deliverable); that it hasn’t necessarily decided whether to build one; and the caution
that the U.S. doesn’t have bombs strong enough to fully stop the program. It’s disputed whether or not this is actually true; what isn’t disputed is that the administration wants Israel and the world to think of an attack as an extremely undesirable (albeit not off-the-table) option, and this helps that.

For now, it’s sabotage and sanctions, including an oil embargo that the European Union and even Turkey have agreed to begin implementing. The big prize is China: after much U.S. and Saudi diplomacy earlier this month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is visiting Beijing this week to urge them to import less Iranian crude. China seems somewhat game, although last week it criticized the embargo.

It’s been said before (including by contributing editor Jeff Goldberg earlier this month), but now, after Iran has been squeezed but before the covert warfare has gotten completely out of hand, is the time to try to strike a deal. “[President Obama] doesn’t have to withdraw any sanctions or any ‘red lines,’” argues Leslie Gelb. “Just cut the usual diplomatic and political baloney, and try. With so much pressure now being applied on Iran, it might work. In the midst of a barrage of economic and military pressures, it is not a sign of weakness or lack of resolve to offer peace. It is classic negotiating from strength.” The threats, the sanctions, the embargos, the assassinations, the sabotage: here, these become leverage, things you can pull back in exchange for concessions. Israel’s and the West’s seriousness of purpose make substantive negotiations more, not less, likely.

Will Israel Attack Iran? [Yahoo! The Envoy]
Israel Senses Bluffing in Iran’s Threats of Retaliation [NYT]
‘Germany To Pressure China Over Iran Oil Imports’ [Reuters/JPost]
How President Obama Should Handle Iran [The Daily Beast]
Earlier: Iran Foes Try to Coax China

With Election Day less than a year away, the core of the Obama campaign’s play for Jewish votes is simple: Overwhelm what the Obama camp sees as Republicans’ bald emotionalism on Israel with a flood of facts and figures. Obama’s campaign website has a section devoted to Jewish issues that includes a seven-page PDF documenting the president’s support for Israel, with a six-page supplement titled “President Obama’s Stance on Israel: Myths vs. Facts.” (“Myth: President Obama believes that Israel is at the root of all problems in the Middle East today. Fact: President Obama declared Israel a source of inspiration for the American people as the sole true democracy in the Middle East.”)

Obama is heading into what promises to be a tough campaign, in which he will need all the enthusiastic support he can get—especially in crucial swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, all of which include substantial Jewish electorates. And while it’s hard to imagine a majority of Jewish votes going to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, a lukewarm showing among the people of the three Velts makes his task that much harder. A recent Gallup poll, conducted in September, showed Jewish support for Obama had plunged 29 points since his inauguration in January 2009. And this fall, in the most Jewish district in the country, disgraced Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner’s seat went to a neophyte Republican candidate, a result voters—albeit Orthodox and therefore not representative of the Jewish vote nationwide—there said they intended to be seen as a referendum on the Obama Administration’s stance toward Israel.

Ask anyone in Obamaland about what is now commonly referred to as the president’s Jewish problem, and the same answer will inevitably follow: “It’s not us, it’s you.” Or, more typically, “it’s them”—the vocal cadres of the Emergency Committee for Israel, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and similarly hawkish groups that, in the administration’s view, have turned Israel into an emotional wedge issue for Jewish voters, in much the same way right-wing groups used abortion to pull Catholics and evangelical Christians away from the Democratic Party in the 1980s. “To the extent we have a problem,” Wasserman Schultz told me last week, “it’s being created by individuals who know that Republicans can’t appeal to Jews on their domestic issues and are attempting to mischaracterize, distort, and lie about the president’s record to create enough distrust in the community to shave off a little bit of support here and there.”

But ask actual voters, and even ardent supporters of the president say the problem is acute. “You say he’s against Israel enough times, and eventually people believe it,” one Obama donor told me earlier this month in Los Angeles, where a recent cover of the local Jewish Journal featured the headline “Angry Jews” on an image of mad-as-hell Howard Beale. “In this town,” the donor went on, “he’s got a Jewish problem.”

Some Jewish voters have sharp policy disagreements with the White House, whether over the president’s early decision to condition Israeli-Palestinian talks on a settlement-construction freeze or his initial commitment to engaging the Iranian regime in talks over its nuclear ambitions. But it is the seemingly endless series of diplomatic and rhetorical faux pas that has reinforced an anxiety among many Jewish voters—including lifelong Democrats—that Obama is somehow not on their side. There was the notorious photo op-less summit between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2010. Just this month, the administration’s ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, the son of a Holocaust survivor, gave a speech drawing distinctions between classical anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which was criticized by Obama antagonists as blaming Israel for contemporary Muslim antipathy toward Jews. Days later came Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s exhortation, at the end of an evening seminar at the Brookings Institution, for Israel to “get to the damn table.”

That these mini-controversies continue to reverberate suggests that Obama’s “Jewish problem” is, at base, an emotional one: a failure to connect with and respond to the concerns of his Jewish constituents. These are voters, it seems, who would find it easier to tune out Republican smears of Obama as anti-Israel if only they had an image of the president addressing the Knesset, or, better yet, splitting a hummus with Benjamin Netanyahu on Jaffa Road.

***

David Axelrod is still perplexed by how hard it was to sell his man to Jewish voters last time around. “We had to work for that vote,” he told me just before Thanksgiving, when we met in the empty conference room he uses at Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago’s Loop. “There was sort of, you know, ‘Where’s he coming from?’ ”

Continue reading: Obama’s kishkes factor

Comes yesterday a new television interview, in which Dagan warned that any Iran action could spark war—rockets—from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran itself, and perhaps Syria. He also added to what is becoming a bitter tit-for-tat with Barak. The defense minister recently claimed that a strike on Iran would result in 500 Israeli deaths max; Dagan said this is a gross underestimate. Barak argued, “When the head of the Mossad unprecedentedly brings journalists to Mossad headquarters and instructs them to oppose the prime minister … I think that is very serious behavior.” Dagan responded, “We are not living in an undemocratic country; in democratic countries, even people like me have the right to express their opinions.”

Finally, it seems like Dagan is indeed entering the political fray to the extent that he can: along with a few other notables, he is spearheading, according to Haaretz, a group that “will endeavor to immediately alter the system of government in Israel.”

If you have some free time this afternoon, I can’t recommend Yossi Melman’s Tablet Magazine profile of Dagan from January (when he retired) enough.

Former Mossad Chief: Israeli Strike on Iran Will Lead to Regional War [Haaretz]
Related: Uncloaked [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Dagan Continues Lonely, Loyal Opposition
Why They Listen to Dagan

When that attack happens, most likely in the early spring, Israel’s second Iranian war will officially begin. The first has been going on through much of the last decade in the battles Israel has been fighting with Iran’s local proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip—and in the secret war being waged against Iran’s nuclear program. The front lines of this war extend thousands of miles, from Bandar-Abbas, an Iranian port on the Persian Gulf, to the eastern Mediterranean and in the Arabian Peninsula, northeast Africa, and north into Turkey. This secret war involves the interdiction of Iranian arms bound for Hezbollah and Hamas and of vital components bound for Iran’s nuclear facilities. Few of these operations, such as the commandeering of cargo ships carrying missiles, are ever revealed as official Israeli actions.

When senior Revolutionary Guards officers, Iranian nuclear scientists, or key Hamas and Hezbollah operatives die or disappear under mysterious circumstances, Israel never takes credit, but it also never seems to dissuade the media from pushing the Israel-did-it angle. Same goes for Stuxnet, the computer worm that plagued Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz and Bushehr, which contained Jewish history clues in its code and featured briefly in a farewell video shown last year at an event honoring departing Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. (Stuxnet is widely believed to be the work of Israel, and the Jewish state encourages that view without actually confirming it.) Saturday’s missile-base explosion, which killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the founder of Iran’s missile program, was only the latest act in this not-so-secret secret war.

The great champion of clandestine war against Iran was former Mossad chief Meir Dagan. During his time at the helm of Israel’s spy agency, from 2002 until early this year, Dagan argued that the only way to counter Iran’s nuclear threat is through secret warfare, close coordination with the Western powers, and quiet alliances with Arab regimes threatened by Iran, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Dagan is a believer in the Ariel Sharon view of things—namely, that the Iranian nuclear program is a problem for the whole world, not just the Jewish state, and therefore Israel should do everything to avoid seeming like it is facing Iran on its own. In the meantime, clandestine warfare can slow Iran’s nuclear progress.

Netanyahu’s decision to replace Dagan—coupled with Barak’s insistence on removing popular army chief Ashkenazi in February—was seen by many as an intentional strategy to remove opponents of a military strike on Iran from positions of influence. In his last week as spy chief, Dagan infuriated Netanyahu and Barak by telling a group of journalists that Iran would not achieve military nuclear capability until 2015—a clear warning against a military strike in the near future, which he has since repeated emphatically in various forums.

The changes at the top of Israel’s security establishment, along with reports on intensive preparations for a strike, prompted U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to visit Israel in early October. Panetta publicly stressed during his visit that the United States is “very concerned” about the Iranian threat but emphasized that countering that threat “depends on the countries working together.” Panetta demanded that Jerusalem warn Washington in advance of an attack on Iran, but he did not receive clear assurances it would, according to American diplomatic sources.

Meantime, Israeli preparations continue. In late October, six Israeli Air Force squadrons sent aircraft 1,500 miles across the Mediterranean for a joint exercise over Sardinia with the Italian and German air forces. This is just one of over a dozen such exercises that have taken place in the last three years, in which Israeli pilots have trained in flying long distances over unknown terrain and facing fighter pilots and anti-aircraft batteries of foreign forces. Fighter pilots aren’t the only component in these maneuvers: Aerial refueling planes and search-and-rescue helicopter teams also take part. The object of these exercises is clear: to prepare an air force that primarily operates in the nearby theaters of Gaza and Lebanon to undertake long-range missions.

The lieutenant colonel who commanded the most recent exercise said cryptically after returning to Israel that “there was no mention of the third circle in the exercise, but we are training over distances and preparing ourselves for all terrains so you could say that it contributes to our long-range preparedness.” The “third circle” is the current air-force euphemism for Iran. (The first circle is the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel’s immediate borders; the second circle is countries around Israel.)

***

Ever since Saddam Hussein launched 39 Iraqi Scud missiles against Israel during the Gulf War in 1991, the Israeli Air Force has been preparing for one primary mission, a long-range attack against weapons of mass destruction aimed at the Jewish state. The lion’s share of Israel’s defense budget has been devoted to this. Five new squadrons of the most advanced versions of the F-15 and F-16, specifically modified for the long-range strike roles, have been acquired since 1998. And the numbers of spy satellites, aerial tankers, unmanned reconnaissance drones, and search-and-rescue helicopters have all tripled in the past two decades.

“Ninety-percent of our equipment and training is for a much larger war. The fighter jets weren’t built for attacking Gaza or even Lebanon; the real war is where we will have to prove ourselves,” one squadron commander recently admitted to me. The air force is eager to do just that. As one brigadier general told me last year, “Come the hour, I will have pilots breaking down my office door demanding to go on the mission.” And come that hour, when at least some of Israel’s defense chiefs are expected to counsel against a strike, it will be the Air Force commander, Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, the son of members of the Irgun, who will give Netanyahu the necessary backing, promising the decision-makers that an air-strike on Iran will succeed.

Yet even the most self-confident fighter jockeys cannot ignore the scores of Israeli and American analysts claiming that Israel lacks sufficient planes and its bases are too far away to totally eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. “We have no illusions,” one air force general told me. “We will attack Iran successfully but that won’t be the end of it. Two, or three, or five years later, we will have to go back there again.”

***

The decision to go to war with Iran is not a political one. It is one of the few issues that transcends Israel’s left-right divide. Benny Begin and Moshe Yaalon, two of the most hardline right-wing ministers in the “Octet Forum,” the Israeli Cabinet’s main decision-making body, are currently opposed to an attack because they believe a military strike will cause a massive backlash from Iran and its proxies and should only be a very last resort. The motives of Netanyahu and Barak are more personal and historical than ideological. The prime minister, the son of a historian, views the Iranian issue through the prism of Jewish survival. In his view, safeguarding Israel against a nuclear threat is the generation’s duty, which has fallen to him. As leader of the opposition, from 2006 to 2009, Netanyahu constantly compared Iran to Germany circa 1938 and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. As prime minister, he has refrained from this terminology but his perspective remains unchanged.

Barak also sees the challenge in generational terms. Two months shy of 70, he looks around and sees no one who, in his opinion, can be entrusted with Israel’s security. Israel’s great founders are gone, save for President Shimon Peres, whom Barak never rated highly (and who is against an attack on Iran). Barak is now the nation’s wise old man, the only responsible grown-up left standing. But his arrogant manner has alienated much of the public and the politicians. Divorced from the Labor party of which he was never an integral part, he leads a splinter faction that does not guarantee him re-election to the Knesset. Convinced that no one else can lead the nation in this challenge, in what could be his last year in government, he won’t let go without ensuring Israel’s security for another generation.

If there are any politics involved in the final decision to attack Iran, they won’t be Israeli. President Barack Obama is the one man who can prevent Israel from going to war. He will have two ways of doing this, if he so chooses. Come this spring, when weather conditions over Iran ensure better bombing results, if the polls indicate him winning a second term, he may have sufficient political and diplomatic clout to order Israel to desist. But in a close presidential race, with a GOP contender accusing him of going soft on Iran, Obama’s only way to block an Israeli attack on Iran would be sending the U.S. Air Force to do the job instead.

• President Ahmadinejad apparently used the word “iota” when describing the distance his country wouldn’t retreat from its current path. [AP/WP]

• Like Israel, the United States isn’t saying much. [NYT]

• The Palestinian Authority’s foreign minister admitted that they won’t get the nine votes they need in the Security Council for full U.N. membership. [AP/WP]

• David Ignatius reports from Cairo, where the Coptic Christian community worries for its future and he worries for all minorities in the post-Arab Spring region. [WP]

• Some morning vlogging from senior writer Allison Hoffman?

None of this actually has to do with the International Atomic Energy Agency report due out next week that is expected to show further Iranian progress and intransigence, right? (Here’s a thought experiment: What if the United States has yanked its IAEA funding by the time the report comes out?) This is for real, and not just deliberate bluster designed to be the stick (the report being the carrot) to goad the international community to further isolating Iran, surely? “Reasonable citizens, at this point quite worried, should take into consideration that a great deal is happening covertly,” write our friends Amos and Avi in Haaretz (and incidentally, even in light of the latest machinations, the Israeli public appears divided on the question of military action). “At least some of these moves are part of a carefully orchestrated campaign whose purpose is not necessarily an Israeli attack. It could be a means of sparking a broad diplomatic maneuver to ratchet up sanctions on Iran.”

They add:

While many people say Netanyahu and [Defense Miniseter] Barak are conducting sophisticated psychological warfare and don’t intend to launch a military operation, top officials, including some in the forum of eight senior ministers, are still afraid.

Ostensibly, Israel is in a win-win situation. If its scare tactics work, the international community will impose paralyzing sanctions on Iran. If the world falls asleep at its post, there are alternatives.

But this is a dangerous game. A few more weeks of tension and one party or another might make a fatal mistake that will drag the region into war.

Happy Thursday, everyone!

Israel and Iran Are Fighting a War of Nerves [Haaretz]

• Yesterday Israel successfully tested a missile that would be capable of reaching Iran from Israel. [AP/WP]

• Syria agreed with an Arab League plan to end the seven-month-long bloody clash with protesters, Syria said. The Arab League says it never got any agreement from Syria. [NYT/DPA/Haaretz]

• Israel is speeding up East Jerusalem building in response to the Palestinian Authority’s acceptance into UNESCO. [NYT]

• The groundwork is being laid for the return of Israel’s ambassador to Cairo, after he left, in extreme haste, two months ago. [Haaretz]

• Beleagured Times Jerusalem bureau chief cancels appearance at 92Y with conservatives. [Ben Smith]

• Iran’s official news agency denied its alleged link to the planned terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., revealed today. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• After a formal probe, Defense Minister Barak formally apologized to Egypt for the deaths of several policemen which Israel mistakenly believed to be terrorists. [Ynet]

• Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, praised Occupy Wall Street in Boston today. [Boston Globe The Angle]

• Michael Douglas as Liberace, directed by Steven Soderbergh. [NYT ArtsBeat]

• Some lady is suing Drive for being anti-Semitic (the gangsters, one of them played by Albert Brooks, are Jewish) and for false advertising. Her lawsuit complains, that there is “very little driving in the motion picture,” which, in addition to being a ludicrous thing to sue somebody over, isn’t even true. [JTA]

Today is National Coming Out Day. And in not-actually-related news, Liza Minelli is visiting Israel next month to attend a premiere of Cabaret.

Liza Minnelli – Cabaret – Maybe This Time by xilegay

Remilitarizing Sinai to some extent is probably good for Israel and for Egypt. “In the past, Israel opposed any alteration of the terms of the treaty,” the Times’s Ethan Bronner reported this weekend. “But the lawlessness—a mix of Bedouin tribalism, radical Muslim infiltration, and a breakdown of Egypt’s security control after its revolution—affects not only Israel, but Egypt, which depends on tourism revenue and gas exports from there.” He added, “As a result, officials here say, the Egyptians are cooperating with Israel. … Israeli officials also say the Egyptian military is making sure that the attack on Israel, which received very limited coverage in Egypt at first, is now getting more public attention.” The Washington Post’s Joel Greenberg sang a similar tune, reporting that the contacts between Egypt’s new military leaders and Israeli officials remain strong.

What happens when more radical groups, chiefly the Muslim Brotherhood, begin obtaining real power in Egypt, starting as early as the parliamentary elections scheduled for next month? (“Who rules Egypt,” one Israeli official asked Bronner, “the army or Tahrir Square?”) Certainly you can find plenty of elements in the Brotherhood who say, well, exactly what you would fear they would say about the Zionist “gang” (Eric Trager has the essential reporting here); certainly you can find the Brotherhood moving to ban tourists from wearing bikinis on the Alexandria beach. In a sense, though, it makes more sense to worry about its bathing-suit polices than its Israel rhetoric. The Brotherhood is going to say not-nice things about Israel and Jews—this is central to what it is and part of its appeal. But if and when it is elected to power, it is going to need to keep the gas flowing, the much-more-powerful Israeli military at bay, and the wealthy, skimpily-clad tourists coming to the beach.

Flagman or no, Egyptian popular interests militate for a basic, cold peace with Israel, and doubtfully one much colder than that which Israel welcomed for three decades with Mubarak. In the long run, an alliance between Israeli popular interests and Egyptian popular interests could be more stable than an alliance between Israeli popular interests and an Egyptian autocrat; it might even bring Israeli popular interests and Egyptian popular interests closer together. Anyway, there is certainly no going back to Mubarak, or a Mubarak-like figure, so mutual selfishness is the best Israel can hope for.

Report: Israel To Allow Egypt to Deploy Troops in Sinai [Haaretz]
Barak: Israel Won’t Let Egypt Deploy More Troops in Sinai at the Present [Haaretz]
With Mideast in Turmoil, Israel Debates Strategy [NYT]
The Unbreakable Muslim Brotherhood: Grim Prospects for a Liberal Egypt [Foreign Affairs/Washington Institute for Near East Policy]
Egypt’s Brotherhood Declares War on the Bikini [JPost]
Earlier: One Weekend, Two Crises
Why Egypt Can Handle Democracy

• Israel had intelligence about last Thursday’s attacks, but Defense Minister Barak refused a preemptive strike on the attackers. [Haaretz/Forward]

• A new WikiLeaks dump reveals that in early 2009 U.S. diplomats were telling the administration that Prime Minister Netanyahu is more pragmatist than ideologue, and that he was keeping all options open on the peace process. [Haaretz]

• President Ahmadinejad advocates a one-state solution, to put it mildly. [AP/WP]

• China announced it would support full Palestinian statehood at the United Nations next month. [AP/Reuters/Haaretz]

• Casey Ribicoff, wife of former Sen. Abraham and a towering figure in New York society, died at 88. [NYT]

At noon Israeli time, gunmen did a drive-by on an Israeli bus. Soldiers who rushed to the scene were greeted by detonated explosives. A mortar and then a pair of anti-tank missiles were then fired into Israel from Sinai; the second one hit a private car and killed six. Prime Minister Netanyahu promised to respond to the three apparently coordinated attacks, which took place near the southern port of Eilat, and Defense Minister Barak claimed that they originated from Gaza while also arguing that they “demonstrate the weakening of Egypt’s control over the Sinai peninsula and the expansion of terrorist activity there.” I am no expert, but the implication would be that, in a stark reversal of what would have happened when President Mubarak was in power, the terrorists slipped out of Gaza into Israel and the Sinai in order to perpetrate the attacks. One explanation for why they might do this is that they could be more radical even than Hamas, which may have prevented them from doing this directly from Gaza, which Hamas controls. But that is just speculation. Hamas declined responsibility for the attacks … which it celebrated: “We praise them because they were against soldiers,” said an official (actually, most of them weren’t).

In an interesting twist, this Saturday’s planned #j14 social justice protests have been cancelled in light of the attacks. Perhaps, per Yoav Fromer, young Israelis are noticing the other problems their country faces?

Meanwhile, take it away, Mr. President:

The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.

Canada and the European Union followed suit (so did prominent Rep. Eric Cantor, Republican from Virginia, who is currently in Israel). The U.S. also placed further sanctions on his regime.

I certainly don’t always agree with Tablet Magazine’s Mideast columnist Lee Smith. But he, who said Obama should say what he said today in April, has certainly been vindicated by events here (as have I, except I was far later to the party). Engagement with Assad—both in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and just generally—has clearly failed. Obama went on to note, “The United States cannot and will not impose this transition upon Syria. It is up to the Syrian people to choose their own leaders,” as if in further confirmation that this has nothing to do with the U.S. Here are some of Lee’s Syria columns from the past, which have all argued that engagement, and the assumption—or even hope—that Assad is a “reformer” is a pipe dream.

7 Dead in Attacks on Israelis Near Egypt [NYT]
Obama Calls on Syrian President to Step Down [NYT]
Seven Killed in Series of Terrorist Attacks in Southern Israel [Haaretz]
Netanyahu Promises Israeli Response to Eilat Attacks [JPost]
Hamas Praises Deadly Attacks in Israel [DPA/Vos Is Neias?]
Israeli Social Justice Campaigners Cancel Weekend Protests After Attacks in South [Haaretz]
Obama on Syria [Politico]

• Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak will be visiting his home-away-from-home—the New York-D.C. Acela corridor—tomorrow and Friday. [The Envoy]

• Facebook will not close pages that deny the Holocaust, for reasons of free speech. A survivors group has criticized the company. [JTA]

• Harold Bloom’s favorite book in the Bible is Jonah, and here he explains why. [NYRB]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first European leader to call for a two-state solution that recognizes Israel as “for the Jewish people.” [Contentions]

• The skinniest house in the world is being built in Warsaw for Tablet Magazine columnist Etgar Keret. [Fast Company]

We all need someone …

The demise of the Israeli left is a fact. Together, Meretz and Labor—formerly the twin pillars of the Zionist left—currently hold 11 Knesset seats, four fewer than Avigdor Lieberman’s ultra-right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party. But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Ignored by most political commentators is the strange and unexpected death of the Israeli right. And like all good thrillers, this one, too, is a murder mystery.

At first glance, pronouncing the Israeli right dead sounds like a bit of sophistry. The current governing coalition, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is widely regarded as the most stringently conservative in Israel’s history. Since being voted into office in 2009, it has, among other achievements: de facto outlawed the public commemoration of the Nakba, the Palestinian narrative of the events that led to Israel’s establishment in 1948 and to the expulsion of nearly three quarters of a million Arabs from their homes; passed a bill requiring new immigrants to swear a loyalty oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, a stroke of legislation that mainly targets Palestinians from the West Bank who wish to marry Israeli Arabs and become Israeli citizens; enacted the anti-boycott bill; and threatened to establish official committees of inquiry targeting human-rights and civil-rights nonprofits. But this busy résumé hides the fact that the political and ideological leviathan that shaped so much of the country’s character for its first five decades has been supplanted by a new and foreign political culture that would have been utterly unrecognizable to Israelis even a decade ago.

One major influence on that culture arrived in Israel from Russia after 1989, along with the million or so immigrants who made aliyah after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While it is never wise to speak of a culture as if it were inalterable and hereditary, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that, to the extent that Russian political culture can be discussed, it is a ghastly oppressive enterprise. This is, after all, a nation that has spent much of the past millennium stumbling from one oppressive autocracy to the next. The majority of Russia’s population lived, until as recently as 1861, as serfs. As Richard Pipes, professor emeritus of history at Harvard and a former Soviet expert, suggested in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, given the Russians’ iron-fisted history, they have traditionally expected their leaders to be groznyi, a word that, applied to Czar Ivan IV, was improperly translated as “terrible” but really means “awesome.” This, Pipes wrote, explains why a 2003 survey found that 22 percent of Russians supported democracy, while as many as 53 percent actively disliked it. Pipes called this phenomenon, still very much in force today, a flight from freedom, and he explained it had much to do with Russia’s perception of itself as a country under permanent siege. The prominent newspaper Izvestiya, he noted, captured this spirit perfectly when it described Russians as “living in trenches,” surrounded by enemies.

It takes a very small leap of imagination to see how perfectly this mentality translates into Hebrew: In Israel, aspiring politicians born in the former Soviet Union found that talk of trenches and enemies made for stellar political currency.

The most renowned example of this new autocratic style is, of course, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current foreign minister. The Moldovan-born politician started his career as Netanyahu’s assistant; within less than two decades, he surfaced as his former boss’s most valuable political partner and, some say, puppet master. Lieberman’s path to power was simple: Whereas most other right-wing politicians spoke sotto voce about ideological opponents, he favored incendiary statements. The Israeli left, he told a radio interviewer in 2007, was responsible for all the nation’s woes. Appearing on television that same year, he compared a prominent civil rights group to concentration camp capos. He snubbed or humiliated foreign dignitaries who would not play by his protocol, refusing, for example, to meet with the former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when da Silva chose to skip the customary visit to Theodor Herzl’s grave. While most Israeli pundits saw such acts as petty and harmful to Israel’s standing in the world, most Israeli voters think Lieberman is groznyi: In mock elections held in Israeli high schools in 2009, a majority of students said they would vote for Lieberman.

But Lieberman is far from alone. Nearly every one of the current government’s repressive bills was sponsored by politicians who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The Nakba law, for example, was sponsored by the Moscow-born Alex Miller of Yisrael Beiteinu. The anti-boycott bill was the brainchild of Ze’ev Elkin of Likud, who emigrated from Ukraine. The bill to form official committees of investigation targeting the left, defeated last week in the Knesset, was formed by Faina Kirschenbaum, also from Ukraine. The list goes on.

Even some staunch Likudniks have been appalled by the Russification of the Israeli right. Most vocal among them was Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset and one of the party’s most prominent figures. A day after the anti-boycott bill passed, the chairman took the unlikely step of criticizing the parliament he himself headed. His ire was reserved for his colleagues on the right; they, he argued, are a disgrace to the legacy of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism and the ideological founding father of Israeli conservatism.

“I stand ashamed and mortified before my mentor, Jabotinsky, for not having succeeded in protecting the individual, whom he likened to a monarch, against the parliamentary fists of the majority,” Rivlin wrote. “It might have been hoped that in an era in which Jabotinsky’s followers are scattered across the whole political spectrum, from the coalition to the opposition, things would be different. But in the absence of an ideological backbone, it appears that even the deep commitment to democracy and individual freedoms of those who call themselves his successors is conditional. It is the State of Israel that is compelled to pay the price of political interests that supersede national interests.”

Other Likud stalwarts were equally horrified. Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, for example—the son of Eliyahu Meridor, a former Likud Member of Knesset and close confidant of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—gave repeated interviews in which he called several of the legislative initiatives brought forth by Lieberman and his associates “very dangerous.” Lieberman wasted no time: Meridor, he told the Israeli media, was a “fineschmecker,” a derogatory Yiddish term for an elitist dandy.

And, as American legislators are learning, once politics becomes a zero-sum game, it is very hard for moderate and mindful legislators to thrive. Ze’ev Elkin, the author of the anti-boycott bill, is a great example. When former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon abandoned the Likud to form Kadima, he was searching for a token settler to add to his new parliamentary faction as a nod to his former supporters in the settler movement who had largely abandoned him in light of his commitment to withdraw from Gaza; he found Elkin. In Elkin’s native Ukraine, the young politician had been known as a capable and committed Zionist activist. After emigrating to Israel in 1990, he excelled in his academic studies, earning degrees in both mathematics and history. When interviewed by Sharon’s associates, he expressed views that were right-of-center, but he stood out as a pragmatic, fair-minded, and soft-spoken individual, a perfect choice for Kadima’s transideological aspirations. Elected to the Knesset in 2006 as a member of Kadima, Elkin soon realized that the winds were blowing away from Sharon’s centrist platform. In 2008, he quit Kadima and joined the Likud. Within a few years, he learned that the only way to survive in a perpetually rightward-moving political universe was to move even further to the right. This, claim some who have long known Elkin, is what’s really behind the anti-boycott bill he sponsored. Aviad Friedman, the Sharon aide who recruited Elkin to politics, told the Israeli daily Maariv last week that “the anti-boycott bill may be good for Elkin when he faces off his rivals in the Likud, but it is very bad for Israel, and I think that deep inside, Ze’ev Elkin knows this well.”

The ideas of the Russified Israeli right find a clear reflection in current Russian political culture, down to the details of the bills that Russian-born Israeli politicians sponsor in the Knesset. In his 2004 State of the Union address for example, Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, announced his intention to investigate nonprofit human rights organizations “obtaining funding from influential foreign or domestic foundations.” Accepting international funding is standard operating procedure for many nongovernmental organizations the world over, but Putin’s speech insinuated that those who criticized the government and profited from foreign funds were disloyal to Russia and somehow dangerous. Within a few years, Putin and his henchmen have succeeded in creating an environment in which it is nearly impossible for NGOs to operate successfully, thereby severely crippling the possibility of a robust political opposition. Faina Kirschenbaum’s proposal to investigate left-wing NGOs, and her allegations that the foreign funds some of those NGOs receive—lawfully and transparently—are a sign of nefariousness, are a page out of the Putin playbook.

The blame for the death of the Israeli right, however, lies not only with Russia but with the United States as well. Orchestrated mainly by Netanyahu, a parade of American political consultants began marching into Israel’s electoral battlefields in the 1990s, changing what was previously a cantankerous but civic-minded political culture into a toxic terrain of secrets and lies familiar to anyone who has grown up on American campaign ads. Take a look, for example, at this extended ad for Labor from 1988. Even in the midst of mad inflation and shortly after the breakout of the first Palestinian intifada, the party’s leaders, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, used their on-screen time to calmly address potential voters, offering up the key points of their political plans, sitting at a desk.

By 1996, political ads looked a lot scarier—the ominous voice-overs, the allegations that political opponents are not just wrong but dangerous: They’re staples of a particular style of campaigning introduced to Israel by the American Arthur Finkelstein, the spin-master Netanyahu had hired. Finkelstein had made his political fortune in the United States by applying simplistic tags to the mostly liberal candidates he’d helped unseat. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, in his catchy formulation, was “too liberal for too long,” and the 1992 Democratic candidate for Senate in New York, Robert Abrams, was “hopelessly liberal.” Both men lost despite overwhelming odds in their favor—Cuomo to George Pataki, Abrams to Alfonse D’Amato. Liberals lost, too: Finkelstein had helped turn the very term “liberal” into a bad word.

In 1996, Finkelstein was recruited by Netanyahu to run a rather hopeless campaign. Rabin, the popular leader of Labor, was assassinated a year prior to the election by a right-wing fanatic whose act was preceded by months of vehement demonstrations featuring signs portraying the elderly prime minister wearing a Nazi officer’s uniform. Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition, was severely criticized after Rabin’s death for fanning the flames of hatred and failing to denounce the violent language and imagery favored by his supporters. To make matters worse, Netanyahu’s opponent was Shimon Peres, Rabin’s closest political ally and co-recipient with him of the Nobel Peace Prize. Early polls predicted an easy victory for Peres. This was when Netanyahu called in Finkelstein.

The American adviser applied the same tactics that worked so well stateside, but he turned up the heat considerably. He orchestrated ads showing the aftermath of suicide bombings. He devised numerous spots showing Peres with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, accusing Peres of blindly succumbing to Arafat’s schemes. Most memorable was his leading slogan: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” It was false; as prime minister, Netanyahu signed on to the very same peace accords that Peres and Rabin were committed to, and none of them advocated the de-unification of Israel’s capital. The slogan was scary, and it worked wonders: Netanyahu won by slightly less than 1 percent.

Finkelstein’s engagement was the first time an American consultant was so deeply involved in an Israeli campaign, but it wasn’t the last—nowadays, many Israeli politicians, left and right, hire Washington’s brightest minds to orchestrate their quests for power. In less than a decade, Israeli political culture, once staid in a C-SPAN sort of way, has become a horror film, with ads and jingles featuring fear, loathing, and blood.

It is, of course, naïve to expect any political culture to remain unchanged and free of outside influence. But when a transformation as massive as the one that has swept the Israeli right in the last five or 10 years occurs, it is time to stop and recalibrate. Old-time Israeli right-wingers like Dan Meridor and Reuven Rivlin are far more likely to see eye-to-eye these days with Meretz’s Nitzan Horowitz, say, than they are with Elkin and other members of Likud.

A few weeks ago, when the anti-boycott bill passed into law, I walked to my bookshelf and pulled out a volume. It was my wedding present from my father, a book bound in thick, rich leather, on its cover a copper emblem featuring the map of Israel crossed by an outstretched hand grasping a rifle and the words rak kach, meaning “only this way.” It was the emblem of the Irgun, the paramilitary organization that fought to expel the mandatory British regime from pre-state Palestine. The book’s author was the Irgun’s last commander in chief, Menachem Begin. It was inscribed to my great-grandfather, Chaim Leibovitz.

“Let justice be the cornerstone of Israel,” Begin wrote in Hebrew, “established with labor, with tears, with suffering, with battle, with blood.”

If only the same spirit still guided the Israeli right.

No, really: Now you can.

As someone who cares deeply about the future of the Jewish state, I spent most of yesterday glued to the debate in the Knesset, which culminated in the passage of a law that would make it illegal to call for a boycott against the state or its West Bank settlements—with a “boycott” defined as “deliberately avoiding economic, cultural or academic ties with another person or another factor only because of his ties with the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control, in such a way that may cause economic, cultural or academic damage.”

“An area under its control,” naturally, means the West Bank, or, more specifically, the Jewish settlements therein, which were never annexed and are therefore, officially and legally, not a part of the State of Israel. That’s an assertion with which none other than the mayor of Ariel, the fourth largest settlement, agrees: In 2001, when he sued the Israeli government for return of funds his municipality had paid in taxes, he noted that “the Ariel Local Council and the municipality, composed of residents of the region, convenes in the region and is managed from Ariel,” and is therefore not part of Israel proper. Amen.

And so, according to the new law, the statement I made in the first paragraph of this article makes me a criminal. So be it. According to the law, in calculating the sum of the damages I’ll be required to pay to whomever presses charges against me, “the court will take into consideration, among other things, the circumstances under which the wrong was carried out, its severity and its extent.” But what effect did this statement I just made have? What is its severity? What its extent? These are precisely the unquantifiable, amorphous, and maddening questions Israeli judges are soon likely to spend much of their time adjudicating. And for what? For a cheap gesture that sacrifices a pillar of democratic rule—freedom of speech—on the altar of politics. Everyone—even those who don’t support boycotting settlements; hell, even those who live in settlements—should find this law obscene.

As it turns out, the law’s iniquities aren’t limited to the geopolitical liberties it has assumed. During yesterday’s debate in the Knesset, Kadima’s Yisrael Hasson, a former high official in the Shin Bet, raised a good point. As of today, he quipped, any Israeli who wishes to deliberately avoid economic ties with, say, a butcher shop that sells treyf, is free to do so; in fact, Hasson noted, many religious Jews advocate such boycotts all the time. And a labor-minded liberal who wants to reject doing business with a company that exploits its workers is welcome to his opinions. But anyone who, based on a similar ideological objection, refuses to buy goods produced in the settlements is now breaking the law. This, Hasson rightly noted, is an absurdity.

The Knesset’s own legal adviser, Eyal Yinon, agreed. Calling the legislation “borderline illegal,” Yinon argued that its definition of boycott “is a violation of the core tenet of freedom of political expression” designed solely to “affect the political debate on the future of Judea and Samaria, a debate that has been at the heart of the political debate in the State of Israel for over 40 years.”

And affect it shall: As the blogger Roi Maor noted in the liberal online magazine +972, the law’s bend is entirely economic. “If the court will find that a wrong according to this law was deliberately carried out,” it reads, “it will be authorized to compel the person who did the wrongdoing to pay damages that are not dependent on the damage” actually done.

This means that the law places the burden of proof not on the plaintiff—which should be the case when one is suing for alleged damages—but on the defendant. It also means that all an activist must do to quash the opinions of those who oppose the settlements is file a suit. Organizations who oppose the settlements—which includes virtually all of Israel’s human rights NGOs—can now be stripped of their nonprofit tax status. Individuals who oppose the settlements can now be taken to court and forced to pay hefty legal fees to defend their freedom of speech. Under these punitive conditions, it is very likely that many will simply choose to remain silent.

This is how oppression works.

There is much more to say about the law. Each of its clauses presents challenges both legal and logical. But let us not waste time parsing words: Anyone who is passionate about Israel’s survival as a Jewish and democratic state should stand up and denounce this law as sharply as possible. It must be repealed, and none of us must remain silent until it is.

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak tried to tone down the rhetoric and his government’s response to the impending flotilla. [Haaretz]

• The U.N.-backed court has delivered four indictments in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanon Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. If they are of four of the wrong people—senior Hezbollah or Syrian officials—the country could blow up, so stay tuned. [WP/AP]

• Activists have accused Israel of sabotaging two flotilla boats. [Haaretz]

• The Syrian army moved out of Hama as well as several smaller cities, giving the anti-regime protesters breathing room and an arguable victory. [NYT]

• Iran accused the United States of using the Syrian uprisings to try to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran. Hey, even a paranoid person is right sometimes! [JPost]

• Ron Prosor, the new Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, urged America’s Jewish institutional community to band together against the Palestinian push for statehood in September. [Haaretz]

• “Joe Lieberman, first Jew on a presidential ticket, was embracing Beck, the leading purveyor of anti-Semitic memes in the mass media,” Dana Milbank notes of the Connecticut senator’s decision to attend this August’s rally in Jerusalem. [WP]

• A moving essay on the unique position of non-naturalized Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. [Michael J. Totten]

• Charlotte Bloomberg, mother of New York Mayor Michael, died at 102 (!). [NYT]

• The lost—not last, but close—Jews of … Libya! [AP/WP]

• Oh, also, they’re not going to kill that dog. [Life in Israel]

“A change was made uptown, and the Big Man joined the band.” R.I.P.

His new outspokenness should be understood in the context of the recent retirements of three top, ostensibly nonpartisan security chiefs—Dagan as well as the head of Shin Bet (essentially Israel’s FBI) and the military chief of staff—and Dagan’s sense that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak (himself a former prime minister) no longer have people on the inside who can dissuade them from their current policies, which could include future military action aimed at Iran’s purported nuclear weapons program. Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, one of Israel’s most influential pundits, tells the Times, in reference to the threatened statehood vote at the United Nations, “Dagan is really worried about September. He is afraid that Israel’s isolation will cause its leaders to take reckless action against Iran.”

Given that Dagan looks to become an increasingly prominent figure in Israel’s political scene—he is barred from running for office for nearly three years, but he is clearly capable of shaping the debate even without a formal position—this weekend might be a good time to read Haaretz spy correspondent Yossi Melman’s January profile of Dagan for Tablet Magazine. Knowing just how successful Dagan’s eight-year stint heading Israel’s foreign intelligence agency was (the bombing of the Syrian reactor, anyone?) is useful for grasping the weight his words carry now.

Former Spy Chief Questions Israeli Leaders’ Judgment [NYT]
Related: Uncloaked [Tablet Magazine]

Nakba Day began inauspiciously when a truck driver from the Israeli Arab town of Kafr Qasem went on a rampage in Tel Aviv, crashing into multiple vehicles, killing one person and injuring 18. Witnesses said that when he finally drew to a halt, he began assaulting passersby, shouting, “Death to the Jews.” Israel Hayom used a witness’ description of the driver as its headline: “Im Retzah Ba’eynayim” (“With Murder in His Eyes”). Police initially refrained from confirming that the incident was a terror attack, but a police official said later in the week, “The indications are that it was carried out deliberately.” The driver says it was an accident. Wrote one blogger, “Forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical.” The incidents in Tel Aviv and the north overshadowed Nakba Day protests elsewhere. In the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians gathered in Ramallah and protesters clashed with Israeli security forces in Qalandiya; at the Gaza border, Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinians attempting to reach the security fence and killed a Gaza man suspected of planting a roadside bomb in the area.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset this week that Israel was prepared to “cede parts of our homeland (moledet) for true peace” with the Palestinians, but added that he did not believe that Israel has a Palestinian peace partner. Yedioth characterized the comments as a “promo” (it even used the English word) for Netanyahu’s speech before both houses of Congress next week. “Netanyahu once again crossed the Rubicon, and once again rushed to renounce and quickly clamber back up the bank whence he came,” wrote Ben Caspit in an analysis for Maariv headlined “Tza’ad Leyamin, Tza’ad Lasmol” (“One Step to the Right, One Step to the Left”).

The state comptroller (mevaker hamedina) accused Defense Minister Ehud Barak of violating “the spirit of the rules” (ruah haklalim) meant to prevent conflicts of interest by waiting until three days before he joined former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government, in 2007, before transferring the shares in his international consultancy firm to his daughters. But Haaretz’s Aluf Benn wrote (albeit in a piece that came out before the comptroller’s report was released) that Barak stands a good chance of becoming prime minister again. Responding to the headline on Benn’s story, “Ehud Barak Doesn’t Care If No One Likes Him,” one commenter wrote: “That is good, since no one likes him.”

Israel’s Sephardic and Ashkenazic chief rabbis as well as Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled that celebrations of the Lag Ba’Omer holiday, which begins Saturday night, should be postponed a day to keep Israelis from desecrating the Sabbath (hilul Shabbat) by starting the holiday’s traditional bonfires before Shabbat has ended. But other rabbis oppose the move, and many of the celebrants can reasonably be expected not to care. “Are all those kids—especially the ones who don’t give much of a hoot what the chief rabbis say—going to push off the burning a day?” one Jerusalemite wrote. “We’ll be away this weekend. … But I have a feeling that we’ll be smelling a few roasted marshmallows on the way home.”

• Obama has been warned that his tough stance on Israel from the outset could very well hurt him with important Jewish donors. Reportedly, one thing that would be a nice salve is a trip to Israel. [WSJ]

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak publicly urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to offer a “daring” peace plan and admitted Israel lacks a “sense of direction.” [LAT]

• The Obama administration finally levied (mostly symbolic) sanctions on President Assad and six other senior Syrian officials. Assad claimed it was doing this to serve the interests of … Israel. So yes it’s possible Israel is being scapegoated. [AP/WP]

• Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigns as head of the IMF. Wait—he hadn’t already?! [NYT]

• Jackson Diehl comes down hard on President Abbas for allying with Hamas—“Abbas blew up four years of U.S.-sponsored institution building, relative peace and growing prosperity in the West Bank”—and says we are too hard on Bibi. [WP]

• Defense Minister Barak argued that Iran would never drop a nuclear bomb on Israel and that Israel should stop scaring people to the effect that such a thing was possible. He did say the ayatollahs are unreliable. [Haaretz]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s military attaché had to bow out of his boss’s trip to London for fear of war crimes prosecution. [AP/WP]

• Nathan Thrall argues that Israel is most effective when it works to improve Palestinian life and engages Palestininan moderates—including some Hamas elements—to deter the real radicals. He discussed reconciliation in The Scroll last week. [NYT]

• Various directions the Arab spring has taken have actually undermined Turkey’s hegemony. [NYT]

• A 10-year-old allegedly shot his father, a member of the country’s largest neo-Nazi party, to death, although the father’s beliefs appear not to have been a motive. I feel bad. For the kid. [AP]

* This was a typo; it should read “right to exist.” However, it is a compelling enough typo that it will remain.

Since the abduction, the Shalit family has received a couple of letters from their son, an audio tape, and finally a short video, delivered in October 2009 in exchange for the release of 20 female Palestinian prisoners. Hamas has refused Israeli demands to allow the International Red Cross to visit Shalit, although Israel allows such visits at its prisons. Not much more is known about the Israeli hostage’s situation. Shalit, now 24 years old, seemed in the 2009 video to have recovered from the physical wounds he suffered during the abduction. The fear now is mainly about Shalit’s psychological well-being: What have nearly five years in total seclusion done to his emotional health? Will he return from Gaza a shadow of his former self? In the video Shalit was quite coherent, but 19 months have passed since the taping, and Shalit had read from a script dictated by his captors. Shalit’s parents are usually reluctant to express personal feelings, but from interview to interview their worry about his mental state only seems to grow.

Hamas activists have told Nathan Thrall, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, that members of the group mentioned “Gilad” many times during phone conversations after the abduction, to mislead Israeli intelligence. “We took Gilad to lunch,” the activists would say, or “We met with him.” But it is believed that the people who are actually responsible for the soldier avoid using phones. Most of their contact with the outside world is done through messengers, young boys who deliver handwritten notes.

Has Israel made any attempts to rescue Shalit since his capture? As far as we know, not anything Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been proud of. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak constantly say that all options remain open and that the Israeli security branches are working on relevant operational plans. Current and former senior officials in Israel’s different security agencies have attributed the failure to rescue Shalit to the strict secrecy surrounding his whereabouts. A tight, disciplined group of members from the organization’s military wing is in charge of hiding the kidnapped soldier and guarding him. The senior members of the military wing, many of them veterans of the Israeli prison system, have learned their lessons from the failures of previous kidnapping attempts. The IDF’s previous chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, admitted in 2009: “We don’t know where Gilad is held.”

One might assume that Shabak, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, has some general information about the area in which Shalit is being held, but for an Israeli prime minister to seriously consider the possibility of a rescue operation along the lines of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, the information has to be precise. Netanyahu also has to ask himself what kind of risk he’d be willing to take regarding the lives of the commandos. If, for example, Shalit is held in a secure basement of a house located in a heavily populated refugee camp, the raid wouldn’t only be a question of the intelligence required—What house? What floor? Is the hostage forced to carry a belt of explosives on his body?—but also how to surprise his guards, send in a team unannounced, and get both the rescue commandos and the hostage out safely without having the whole of the Gaza Strip on their tails?

Senior Israeli officers with experience of missions of this sort admit that imagining a Shalit rescue is the most challenging tactical problem they have ever encountered. Netanyahu, contrary to his right-wing ideological background and tough public persona regarding terrorism, has actually been very careful about using military force in the past, because he knows that operations can go terribly wrong. He lost his older brother, Col. Yoni Netanyahu, in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, during the most famous and heroic Israeli rescue operation. In 1994, Shabak located another kidnapped soldier, Nahson Waxman, who was held in a Palestinian village near Jerusalem. Both Waxman and an IDF officer were killed during the rescue attempt.

But Israel has also failed to successfully apply non-military pressure on Hamas. After Shalit’s abduction, Israel arrested about 40 Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament and a few ministers in the West Bank, who were then released—moves that seemed largely inconsequential on the Palestinian side. In late February this year, a Palestinian engineer and presumed Hamas member, Dirar Abu-Sisi, disappeared while riding a night train in Ukraine. A few weeks later, Israel admitted to having him in their custody but refused to discuss how he got there. The German weekly Der Spiegel, considered to have great intelligence sources, claimed Abu-Sisi was kidnapped by Mossad agents looking to discover where Shalit is being held. Abu-Sisi denies any knowledge of Shalit’s whereabouts. And last month, the Israeli Air Force assassinated Tayser Abu-Snima, a member of the Popular Resistance Committees who is considered to have been involved in the planning of the Shalit abduction.

When Shalit was kidnapped, Ehud Olmert was serving as prime minister. In March 2009, as Olmert was being forced out of office after he was indicted for corruption, many Israeli analysts assumed that Olmert would try to finish the Shalit deal before handing over the government to Netanyahu. An Israeli delegation, including Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin and Olmert’s chief negotiator on the swap, Ofer Dekel, traveled to Cairo for indirect negotiations with Hamas. The Israelis stayed in one hotel, while the leader of the Hamas military wing, Ahmad Al-Jaabri, whom Israel had tried to assassinate numerous times, stayed in another. Olmert’s people now claim that the Egyptians came close to striking a deal. But then, they say, Hamas officials watched a TV broadcast showing then and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak sitting with the Shalit family. Barak went there to express support for the parents’ demand that the government make more concessions and close the deal. Hamas, says Olmert, immediately realized that it now had power to squeeze Israel into new concessions and refused to sign the agreement. Barak, naturally, denies the story.

Al-Jaabri and the senior members of Hamas’ military wing seem to be calling the shots regarding a possible Shalit deal. During the Cairo talks, Hamas was represented by three members of the military wing and only one member of the political wing, Mahmud a-Zahar. Even the head of Hamas’ political office in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, usually considered the organization’s leader, can only advise Al-Jaabri on the subject. While the Hamas government in Gaza has asked Al-Jaabri many times to reach an agreement with the Israelis, he has refused, insisting that Israel should accept all his demands. A year ago, a crisis developed in the Hamas leadership over Shalit, and a-Zahar resigned from the negotiation team. Six months later, he rejoined. It is not known how the prospective Hamas-Fatah pact is likely to affect the splits within the Hamas leadership or the possibilities for a deal.

During the last four years and 11 months, Hamas has been trying to create public pressure on the Israeli government to agree to Hamas’ terms for completing the deal. It started with the publication of one of Gilad Shalit’s letters to his family after less than a year in captivity. But Hamas’ attempts to ratchet up the pressure on Israel have grown more complex with time and have recently been aimed at creating a feeling of urgency or panic in Israeli public opinion. For example, a demonstration organized by Hamas in Gaza included a performance in which a Palestinian actor playing Gilad Shalit appeared in a cage, crying for his release. In April 2010, the armed wing of Hamas released an animated video portraying Shalit’s father, Noam, walking empty streets, carrying a picture of his son. He passes by billboards with Olmert promising in Hebrew to release Gilad. Then Noam passes a picture of Netanyahu, who promises the same. In the background, you can hear the real voice of the abducted soldier. The Noam character continues to walk, growing old with a walking stick until the announcement comes that a deal has been completed. The father is then shown waiting for Gilad at the entrance to the Gaza Strip. A Red Cross bus arrives carrying a coffin covered with the Israeli flag. Noam cries out and wakes up from a nightmare. The subtitle reads: “There is still hope.”

***

What is known is that Hamas is currently demanding that Israel release 1,000 prisoners for Shalit, in two stages. At first, 550 prisoners chosen by Israel would be freed in return for Shalit being delivered to a third party, presumably Egypt. Then, Israel would release 450 more prisoners, from a list of names that Hamas has provided. Israel has also discussed another release of 400 prisoners as a gesture to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Both sides have agreed on the mechanism by which the prisoners would be released. The heart of the problem remains the group of 450 prisoners Israel says has blood on its hands. Many of these prisoners are serving life sentences for their involvement in the murder of hundreds of Israelis during the Oslo peace process and the Second Intifada. Hamas expects the release of some of its senior prisoners and also of Marwan Bargouti, one of Fatah’s leaders in the West Bank, and Ahmad Saadat, the leader of the Palestinian Popular Front. According to reports printed in the Arab press, the debate now concerns a few dozen prisoners. Israel insists that some of these men remain in jail. Others, it suggests, will not be allowed to return to their homes in the West Bank but will be kept further away, in Gaza or in Europe, since they might help Hamas rebuild its terror networks if they were permitted to stay in the West Bank. Netanyahu has said lately that most of the discussion now regards the number of prisoners to be deported.

A senior Egyptian official who participated in the negotiations says that Israel has handled the issue “worse than a used cars salesman.” The Israelis, he insists, “behaved like amateurs. They drew an imaginary red line and then agreed to withdraw, again and again. And all this time Hamas didn’t blink. They never moved an inch.” In the beginning, Olmert agreed to free only a few dozen prisoners from the Hamas list. By the end of his term, it was 325 of the 450—and it is believed that Netanyahu has agreed to go even further.

After Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in early 2009, Germany replaced Egypt as the primary mediator between Israel and Hamas. The chief German representative, Gerhard Conrad, has acquired a great deal of experience in previous prisoner deals with Hezbollah. This time, it seems his mission is even more difficult. In early April, Hamas officials reported that Conrad’s latest visit to the region had failed. A few days later, Netanyahu’s negotiator, Hagai Hadas, announced his resignation, saying he had promised his family that he would retire after two years. Netanyahu quickly replaced him with another Mossad official, David Meidan, the former head of the organization’s international relations branch, which means that the Shalits will now have to deal with its third official representative in less than five years.

***

Meanwhile, Gilad Shalit himself has become a sort of national hero, our collective Israeli child. His is the young face that an entire nation reflects upon in a mixture of guilt, mercy, and sympathy. While the United States generally refuses to negotiate with the kidnappers of American citizens or soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (Olmert says that President George W. Bush was angry at him for “talking to terrorists” regarding Shalit), here everything is open to bargaining.

The difference between the American and Israeli approaches to hostage situations might have a lot to do with the fact that Israel has a mandatory military service, while in the United States, an American soldier’s kidnapping might almost be considered a freely chosen occupational hazard. In a small society like Israel, where every young man is expected to serve, the general sense of solidarity with Shalit is huge, particularly among the young. Israeli sensitivity toward military casualties has grown rapidly over the last two decades—and is even greater when it comes to live hostages.

The Shalit family’s tragedy has become a national story whose continuing resonance throughout most sectors of Israeli society is hard to overstate. Gilad Shalit’s face can be seen on more Israeli T-shirts than Che Guevara, Jim Morrison, and Bart Simpson put together. Google will turn out 2.2 million results for his name in Hebrew alone, while the names of the officer and soldier killed in his tank are nearly forgotten. Two months ago, Israeli police arrested a con man suspected of stealing hundreds of thousands of shekels from citizens who believed they were contributing money to the Shalit cause.

Gilad’s parents, Noam and Aviva, have stayed for months at a protest tent across the road from Netanyahu’s official residence. On cold Jerusalem nights, one can see them there, two lonely figures, fighting the freezing wind. The Shalits are considered a very polite, patriotic family, though in an interview with us two and a half years ago, Noam Shalit attacked Olmert quite aggressively. Had Olmert and his sons served in combat units themselves, he implied, the prime minister’s attitude might have been different. For Noam Shalit, whose twin brother Yoel died as a tank commander in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, this is a very thorny issue. His relationship with Netanyahu (a former officer of the elite special forces unit Sayeret Matkal) is slightly better.

New initiatives on Shalit’s behalf are born every week. One Tuesday morning this March, a group of citizens called upon all Israelis to stop what they were doing for five minutes and think of Shalit. Hundreds of thousands of people participated, including President Shimon Peres and many government ministers. It was an act of frustration, of impotence, wrote Michal Levertov in Haaretz. Like another new Israeli custom—leaving an empty chair for Gilad during the Seder—the protest moves the problem into the mystical world, exempting the government from responsibility for Shalit’s fate. Levertov called such acts “a memorial for a living soldier.” She is right.

The organization campaigning for Shalit’s release, a movement that depends strictly on volunteers, has debated one question for years: Should the fight become more aggressive? The debate inevitably brings up the Groff affair, during which eight IDF soldiers were kidnapped in 1983 by Palestinians in Lebanon. Miriam Groff, one of the soldiers’ mothers, applied personal pressure on then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and even collapsed in his office. Rabin couldn’t stand it and approved the Jibril prisoners swap, agreeing to release hundreds of terrorists. Two years later, many of those prisoners helped ignite the First Intifada.

***

Growing public support for Shalit’s release “at any cost” drives the old guard in Israel—former generals and the conservative right—crazy. Many see the attitude toward Shalit as sentimental and childish. They are also afraid that his release will bring a huge surge in morale for Hamas, not to mention the danger from hundreds of experienced terrorists coming back to the territories after gaining a lot of knowledge from their colleagues in Israeli jails. “Shabak officials showed me the list of prisoners who are supposed to return to my area,” says one IDF regional commander in the West Bank. “I’m very worried. This would completely change the situation here.”

Retired Maj. Gen. El’azar Stern is one of the proposed deal’s toughest and most vocal opponents. “Shalit should not be released at any cost,” he told us. “Hamas’ demands are irrational and not proportional. We should not think only of the Shalits but also of the parents of children who might be killed if these murderers are released.” Much of the public hysteria is produced by a PR firm working with the Shalit family and movement, Stern said, pointing at the ceiling. The PR firm’s offices are located a few floors above Stern’s office, at the Azriely complex in midtown Tel Aviv. Like others who oppose a swap, Stern reminded us that in 2004 Israel released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in return for the bodies of three IDF soldiers and one (living) corrupt reserve officer held in Lebanon. The result? According to Shabak, 165 Israelis were killed by some of these former prisoners over the following three years.

Netanyahu is not impervious to such arguments. Recently, while speaking to Knesset members from the right wing of his Likud party, he complained about their attacks against him. “I’m doing everything I can to keep the prisoners in jail,” Netanyahu reprimanded one MK. “They’re all supposed to be released for Shalit. It’s just me, only me, alone, preventing this, under enormous pressure. I agreed to free more prisoners than Olmert did, but I refuse to let them come back to Judaea and Samaria. Let them go to Tunisia.”

On the other hand, here’s what Nahum Barnea, a senior Israeli journalist, wrote in Yedioth Ahronot the day the entire country stopped for five minutes in honor of Shalit. Maybe there’s no other way but paying the full price Hamas demands, he wrote. The government has tried everything and failed. After almost five years it’s time to move on. Barnea’s main argument refers to the damage the Shalit affair has caused to the heart of the state’s commitment to its citizens, and especially its combat soldiers. While service in the IDF is mandatory, combat service is no longer unavoidable, and an 18-year-old Israeli can easily find ways to serve in comfortable places and avoid danger. IDF senior officers have told us, on numerous occasions, that Shalit’s fate is a source of constant frustration among their troops. The fear young soldiers show for their lives gradually erodes the unwritten agreement between them and their government.

Although public opinion polls show a steady majority of support for “great concessions” in return for Shalit’s release, some analysts believe that publishing the names of the senior prisoners to be included in the swap (and their deeds) might change the public’s attitude. Being familiar with the details of the case, and the men who are likely to be released in any prisoner swap, we have differing views on the wisdom of a deal. In fact, having worked and written together for many years, we have yet to encounter a question in which our own personal opinions are so divided. It may be, as the saying has it, that you stand where you sit. One of us (Issacharoff) tends to emphasize the huge advantages Hamas will gain from a deal, the danger to the PA regime in the West Bank, and the possible future terrorist attacks. The other (Harel) concentrates on the ongoing damage to the IDF’s spirit. It is also an emotional issue: When your 7-year-old son’s favorite bedtime imaginary game becomes “saving Gilad Shalit,” it is hard not to want to see Shalit free, whatever the cost.

Amos Harel is the defense analyst for Haaretz. Avi Issacharoff is the newspaper’s Arab affairs correspondent. They blog at MESS Report, on Haaretz.com.

The society was originally founded as a thumb-in-the-eye to Yale history—Jews, blacks, Muslims, women and gays were prohibited from joining the traditional secret societies. This secret society, however, would include everyone, so long as you were a promising Yale-affiliated leader of tomorrow.

So really, the perfect emblem of our post-Obama meritocratic moment: The sort of place that can host both Ehud Barak and Elliott Gould.

For the skinny on Yale’s actual secret societies, or at least the most famous of them, check out this amazing piece, from a while ago, by Tablet Magazine contributor Ron Rosenbaum.

Yale’s Secret Society That’s Hiding in Plain Sight [Time]
Related: The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones [Esquire/Prison Planet]

“Simple Twist of Fate”: For every Israeli sports team that has tried, and almost succeeded, and eventually failed to advance in any important international tournament.

“Maggie’s Farm”: For former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is always on the lookout for a good real estate deal.

“Somebody Touched Me”: For former President Moshe Katsav.

“I Shall Be Released”: For Marwan Barghouti, the popular Palestinian leader, currently languishing in an Israeli prison.

“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”: For Defense Minister Ehud Barak, quitter extraordinaire.

”You Gotta Serve Somebody”: For the evangelical Christian tour groups.

“It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”: For every child, Israeli and Palestinian, needlessly dying while leaders keep on missing opportunities and breaking promises.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues”: For Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier held in some subterranean basement in Gaza, homesick and, more importantly, probably actually sick.

ENCORE:

“Gates of Eden”: For the Messiah, who has not come yet.

“The Mighty Quinn”: Because when He does come, everybody’s gonna jump for joy (and maybe he’ll even be an Eskimo).

“Girl From the North Country”: For Golda Meir, Wisconsin’s own and still a rock star.

Dylan Show Confirmed for June in Ramat Gan [JPost]

• Alan Gross, the 61-year-old American contractor who was helping Cuba’s Jewish community and was accused of being a spy, was sentenced to 15 years in jail over the weekend. The United States condemned the punishment. [JTA]

• Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that if Israel didn’t quickly move to help establish a Palestinian state, it would face “a diplomatic tsunami.” Holy innapropriate metaphors, Batman! [Haaretz]

• The sides are gearing up in Egypt for next Saturday’s constitutional referendum. Hosni Mubarak’s old party and the Muslim Brotherhood support the proposed reforms; most of the other parties do not. [NYT]

• Foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that the U.S. should maneuver the Security Council into authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya—something which the Arab League endorsed over the weekend. [NYT]

• Tawfik Toubi, 88, the last surviving member of Israel’s first parliament, died. Somehow it’s fitting that he was also the founder of the Israeli Communist Party. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• And yet even as protesters push for a faster timetable, democracy activists question if elections in the near future are feasible and will not prove counterproductive. [WP]

• U.S. regional allies—which is to say, several Arab states and Israel—have lobbied extremely hard for the United States to back a process that retains as much stability as possible. [NYT]

• To reinforce Israel’s message, Defense Minister Ehud Barak meets with Secretary of Defense Gates and others in Washington, D.C., today. [Laura Rozen]

• Good to know someone is still listening to Mohammed ElBaradei. (I’m being mean: Friedman also talks to Wael Ghonim, in many ways the protesters’ leader. But why does everything have to be “post-ideological” with him?) [NYT]

• A Jewish refugee from Austria who fought hard and sucessfully—in her 80s—to recover several Gustav Klimt works that had belonged to har family died at 94. [NYT]

The four days of meetings were an exercise in gloom, as the complexity and enormity of the threats confronting Israel became increasingly evident. Egypt’s cyber-revolution—no matter how it turned out, several analysts suggested—could clearly threaten Israel’s three-decade-old peace with Egypt. Rather than a quasi-credible Jeffersonian democracy, warned Shlomo Avineri, a former director general of the foreign affairs ministry now teaching at Hebrew University, history taught us that a military dictatorship, or chaos, or a government dominated by the anti-Israeli Muslim Brotherhood, or a “combination” thereof were far more likely alternatives.

Plus, whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood eventually came to power as a result of Egypt’s uncertain political transition, several experts argued, any more “democratic” Egyptian government that more closely reflected the views of Egyptians would inevitably be much less friendly toward the Jewish state. It would also most probably be more supportive of Hamas and of Palestinian aspirations in general, less sympathetic toward the American-brokered peace process, and perhaps more reticent about challenging Iran.

While Egypt was the Arab state of most immediate concern, the gathering saw events in Tahrir Square as but a reflection of what analysts here spoke of as an underlying “virus”—the potentially destabilizing yearning for greater freedom in the Arab world, respect for human rights, and tolerance of dissenting views and ethnicities. Only at a gathering of proudly hard-nosed defense experts would such political goals be likened to a dreaded disease.

One of the less gloomy assessments involved Iran, the topic that had deeply depressed and divided last year’s gathering. Recent American and Israeli intelligence assessments were suggesting that a combination of tougher sanctions and covert action—the assassination of Iranian scientists; the sabotaging of sophisticated parts and equipment; and Stuxnet, the “virus” that most Herzliya participants seemed to love and for which they privately claimed some pride of ownership—had delayed Iran’s nuclear weapons ambition by two to four years. Dov Zakheim, a former American under-secretary of Defense, told the Jerusalem Post and conference participants that Israel did not have to attack Iran to stop its nuclear program. Thanks to its deployment of the Arrow 2 ballistic missile defense system, which relies on U.S. Navy Aegis missile defense ships in the Mediterranean, he said, there was now “less than a one percent chance that an Iranian missile would get through these defenses.”

The newly bolstered confidence, however, did not prompt Israelis to stop blaming the Obama Administration for having “wasted” a year, as one Israeli defense analyst put it, by trying to engage and coax Tehran into suspending or stopping its enrichment program and other activities consistent with weapons-making efforts.

The experts also continued blasting the Obama Administration for pressuring Israel to return to the peace table by insisting that Netanyahu freeze all settlement expansion activity, a demand that had forced the Palestinian Authority to adopt the same position.

While several Israelis seemed, if not content, at least willing to tolerate the lack of progress toward renewing peace talks with the Palestinians and Israel’s other foes—the status quo was the “worst alternative, except for all the others,” asserted Martin Kramer, of the Shalem Center—others warned that the perpetuation of the status quo was unacceptably dangerous for Israel. Those who blamed Israel for failure to make progress on the peace front would use the stalled process as yet another justification for delegitimizing Israel.

One indication of the sorry state of the on-again, mostly off-again, process was the no-show by Yasser Abed Rabbo, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the only senior Palestinian official who was scheduled to speak at the conference.

His was not the only empty chair, however. Defense Secretary Ehud Barak, who had recently quit the Labor Party to form a new center-Zionist faction called Independence in order to keep his thankless Defense post, flew to Washington to brief senior American officials on the Mubarak mess. Nor did Bibi Netanyahu attend—the first time in the conference’s 11-year history that an Israeli prime minister has not addressed the gathering. Israelis grumbled that Bibi felt that too many of the conference sponsors were hostile to him and his political agenda.

Senior officials who did attend were virtually unanimous in denouncing the Israeli government, arguing that Israel’s political system had become utterly dysfunctional. Weakness, selfishness, and greed jeopardized the state itself, warned Tzipi Livni, chairperson of the Kadima party, the former minister of foreign affairs, and the head of the not-so-loyal opposition.

Much of the conference gossip focused on Israel’s inability to take tough decisions given its corruption and increasingly bitter partisan divisions, a failure that has rarely been bandied about quite so openly.

At the session’s end, Uriel Reichman, the president of the IDC Herzliya, lamented the tragic deaths of three IDC graduates. Yossi Dahan had volunteered to serve in the paratroopers, where he was a first lieutenant. He helped support his family by working as a night watchman at a house in Kfar Shmaryahu. One night two motorcyclists drove by the house and sprayed it with bullets, killing Dahan. His killers were never caught. He was a victim of organized crime, Reichman charged, crime that had penetrated even high levels of government. He named no names; he didn’t have to.

The second victim, Roi Assaf, was on summer break in Sinai when he was killed by Muslim terrorists. He was 28 years old. He had done volunteer work in his hometown of Kfar Saba.

Nir Katz, 26, was a computer science major. He was killed in 2009 at the gay community center in Tel Aviv where he did volunteer work. His crime was being gay, Reichman said.

All three of these young men, Reichman said, embodied the spirit of Israel and had been killed for naught. Violence, he said, had become part of Israeli life. Israel needed not only a new system of government, one that was not paralyzed by religious and ideological divisions. It also needed a less violent, more moral and caring society.

It needed to rein in its own “fundamentalism,” he said, by refusing to permit groups who cared little for Israeli values to control the country’s education system and live off of tax-payer financial support. It needed citizens who would fight for their path and for a just state. It needed to recapture its vision.

***

February 8, 2011, 2:15 p.m.: So much angst, so little time. Here at the annual Herzliya conference, Israel’s premier international national security gathering, the gloom was so thick that it made me nostalgic for old-fashioned Southern California smog. In the second and third days of the conference, worry about Egypt gave way to anxiety about the rift with the Islamist government of Turkey, the growth of militant Islamist forces throughout the region, Israel’s growing vulnerability to cyber-attack, the global campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state, the increasing apathy of young Jews toward Israel, and above all, the threat posed by an increasingly assertive Islamic Iran, which will probably sooner or later go nuclear.

Herzliya is the Bataan death march of conferences. Roundtables start at 7:30 each morning and don’t end until after 9 p.m. Participants are given the luxury of 5-minute breaks between multiple, overlapping sessions. Lunch is less than an hour, and dinner is a rushed affair in a large tent at the exhausting day’s end. But this daunting schedule seems not to faze Israelis, for whom Herzliya is yet another opportunity to do what they love most: schmooze. The real news and gossip at this gathering is less likely to be exchanged in the formal meetings than in the corridors outside the meetings where Israelis huddle to drink endless cups of coffee, talk on their cell phones, and exchange news and views with friends and acquaintances.

Apart from the conference papers, there was plenty of news to digest. Late Monday afternoon, London’s Daily Telegraph published a Wikileaks cable reporting that Israel had long favored Egypt’s newly minted vice president Omar Suleiman to succeed President Hosni Mubarak. According to the U.S. State Department cable, written in 2008, David Hacham, an adviser to Israel’s military intelligence chief, told American diplomats in Tel Aviv that year that Suleiman, Egypt’s chief of intelligence, would be the most likely to serve as “at least an interim president if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated.”

“There is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect” of Suleiman, wrote diplomat Luis Moreno, who quoted Hacham as saying that he and Suleiman’s deputy spoke on a “hotline” at least several times a day. The cable added that an Israeli delegation headed by Defense Minister Ehud Barak had been “shocked by Mubarak’s aged appearance and slurred speech” when it met with him in Egypt.

The leak of the cable at this delicate moment in Israeli-Egyptian relations is bound to embarrass both Israel and Suleiman, the official whom ailing president Mubarak has named to oversee Egypt’s political transition to an ostensibly more open, transparent system in the wake of mass protests.

“What we don’t need now is for Omar Suleiman to be seen by Egyptians and other Arabs as Israel’s poodle,” said one Israeli official at the gathering who asked not to be identified.

As Egypt’s intelligence chief, Suleiman handled two of the most sensitive portfolios for Mubarak—counter-terrorism efforts with Washington and relations with Israel. While Israelis were discussing Egypt’s political fate, Vice President Suleiman was continuing his meetings with opposition figures in Cairo, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organization that is hostile to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and the parent of Israel’s Palestinian foe, Hamas.

Meanwhile, some Israelis at Herzliya disputed the widespread perception that no one predicted the current unrest in Egypt. Several conference participants told me that Israeli analysts have been concerned for some time about relations with Cairo in a post-Mubarak Egypt. Last March, one Israeli said, a respected Israeli specialist met with an elite group of American intelligence officers and Middle Eastern specialists in Washington to discuss scenarios that would challenge U.S. interests and capabilities in the Middle East.

The Israeli had presented the following scenario: As Mubarak falls ill and protesters take to the streets by the thousands, Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son, fails to win military support as his father’s successor. Intelligence chief Suleiman takes control. But taking advantage of the chaos, the Muslim Brotherhood uses the mass discontent and divisions within the ranks of Egypt’s opposition to come to power. The new government promptly distances itself from Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, moves troops in violation of the treaty into the Sinai Peninsula, works closely with militant Hamas in Gaza, and flirts with Iran. Israel feels it must respond.

The Americans were clearly unimpressed with the presentation, the Israeli analysts recalled, pronouncing the entire scenario “far-fetched.” Now that Act I has been played out before the television cameras in Cairo, Israel finds itself sitting uncomfortably close to the stage, hoping that the Americans were right after all.

***

February 7, 2011, 1:00 p.m.: The 11th annual Herzliya Conference, usually a buoyant assembly of Israel’s brightest and most ambitious national security minds, globe-trotting security experts, and glad-handing politicians, opened Sunday under a cloud of gloom. Many of the attendees were openly anxious about the crisis in Egypt, the first Arab state to have made peace with Israel more than 30 years ago. Israelis had come to take the peace with Egypt and all the benefits that it brings—from diplomatic support and military coordination against Hamas to neutralizing what had been the Arab world’s largest army—for granted.

Israelis have criticized Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for enforcing a cold peace and yearned to be not just accepted in the Arab Middle East, but embraced. Egypt’s seemingly eternal ruler had taught them they would have to live with less. Now, as newly minted Vice President Omar Suleiman, the former chief of Egyptian intelligence, opened meetings with some of the opposition factions and launched a transition to an uncertain future, Israelis whispered in the corridors of this prestigious conference that even their cold peace was now in jeopardy.

Israelis see the demonstrations against Mubarak not as an expression of a popular Egyptian yearning for freedom but through the lens of their own existential fears, and what they see frightens them, badly. They worry about the Muslim Brotherhood rising to power in free elections, and they are shaken by the speed with which the United States has abandoned a stalwart ally. Smadar Perry, a Yediot Ahranot Israeli journalist who has interviewed Mubarak many times, slammed the Obama Administration in an article Monday posted on “BitterLemons,” an English-language Israeli-Palestinian web site. Decrying the administration’s treatment of Mubarak as “crude and arrogant,” she likened the administration’s stance to that of “an elephant … sent to stomp on the Mubarak regime.” Perry was “shocked,” she wrote, by Obama’s abandonment of its ally. Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, were “presiding over an anti-Mubarak agenda” almost as harsh as that of Al Jazeera, she charged.

Even Israelis who do not admire Mubarak understand his vital contribution to their security. Will a new elected Egyptian leader continue to help Israel enforce its embargo against militant Hamas in Gaza, which vows never to accept a Jewish state on sacred Islamic soil? Will any representative Egyptian government be willing to help contain Iran by granting Israeli warships free passage through the Suez canal? Will Israelis now need to worry about infiltration from Hezbollah and Hamas in the Sinai Peninsula? Will the next Egyptian government help neutralize Iran’s nuclear program? What about continuing to deliver the gas that keeps the lights on in Tel Aviv and Haifa?

The subtext of the concerns was an even less often articulated question: How could Israel depend on a superpower that would so easily “throw such a stalwart ally to the wolves”? as one veteran intelligence officer who worked for many years in Washington put it.

Israel is not Egypt, one Israeli analyst here comforted himself and fellow analysts by saying at a session on “Scenarios and Strategic Implications,” which encouraged senior Israeli officials to speak by assuring their anonymity, which I will honor. There is a sea of difference between Israel and Egypt, several panelists insisted. Israel is not only a democracy, one veteran Israeli diplomat asserted, but a country with a huge base of support in the U.S. Congress and among the American people. Egypt had never enjoyed comparable popular support.

The flip side of Israel’s concern was fear that the United States is withdrawing from the Middle East and turning inward—that its role as Israel’s guarantor and status as sole remaining superpower is being abandoned—along with market share and economic prowess—to China.

Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama’s former assistant for economics adviser, now back at Harvard, assured the group that this was not the case. The Unites States is recovering economically, he said. American confidence in itself is being restored. Microsoft is worth more than all of America’s car, steel, and aerospace production, by a factor of 1.5. Only in the United States and Israel, he said, complimenting his hosts, “could you raise $100 million before buying your first suit.”

Nor is America turning inward, he asserted. While Europe and many non-Middle Eastern states had an interest in the outcome of the power struggle under way in Egypt, “only Washington felt it had an obligation to respond.”

But such reassurances seemed to do little to allay the anxiety so evident at Herzliya. Will the Egypt virus spread, and to which of Israel’s other Arab allies? What about neighboring Jordan, where demonstrators have also held large rallies to protest skyrocketing food, fuel, and housing prices? “We need to calm down and double check what is needed to shore up this moderate regime,” one participant suggested. Israel had already come to Jordan’s aid once before, during its 1970 civil war with the Palestine Liberation Organization. What if the moderate Hashemite ruler of Jordan were swept away by the current wave of protest engulfing the region? Would Egypt’s current plight embolden Iran?

Israelis have few illusions about the fragility of the autocracies surrounding them. “We have been sitting on a volcano since the end of the cold war,” said one veteran Israeli student of the Arab world.

At the end of the gloomy morning, one Israeli analyst wondered whether the crisis in Egypt might not ultimately play to Israel’s favor. Would Israel not emerge clearly now as the United States’ only reliable, dependable strategic “asset” in the otherwise volatile region?

“We are an island of stability in a sea of dictatorship,” Yael German, the mayor of Herzliya, told the gathering in an on-the-record plenary session.

President Shimon Peres, who looked two decades younger than his 87 years, also sounded upbeat, as usual, about Israel, and also Egypt. The Middle East is experiencing a genuine revolution, he said, “more spontaneous than organized,” from “the bottom up rather than the top down.” It was a revolution for “computers rather than flags.” Its proponents wear T-shirts and jeans, the “garb of equality,” and a manifestation of the “resentment of the gap between rich and poor.”

Peres’ sympathy for the pro-democracy protesters in the streets of Cairo and Tunis betrayed his Labor party roots, and not Israel’s modern version but the party of an earlier if not simpler time when Israelis of that persuasion called one another “comrade.”

Hosni Mubarak has done a lot for peace, said Peres, “but young Egyptians want democracy too.” They also want iPhones and the Internet. “You can lock the door,” he said. “But the Internet is a window.”

Modern technology has permitted young Egyptians and Arabs to know what was going on. A simple change of government would not solve Egypt’s problems, he warned. Thanks partly to technology, Israel has galloped ahead, alleviating the poverty that gripped much of the region. Though Israel was a “small country with only two lakes—“one dead and one dying”—its agricultural sector had the highest yield in the world. And 95 percent of Israel’s agricultural sector was high-tech. The region itself must follow Israel’s example and “free itself from poverty” for peace to prevail, he said.

Peres, occupying a ceremonial post that has nonetheless let one of the most talented, experienced politicians in the country continue to soldier on for the causes he has long embraced, also paid lip service to the need to negotiate a peace with the Palestinians that would result in “two states for two peoples.” Making peace, he said, was like crossing the Red Sea. Though difficult, he said, “the alternative is far more dangerous.”

His talk, however, highlighted the lack of priority on the peace process and the Palestinians. Patrick Clawson, a specialist on Iran from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was struck by the virtual absence of the peace process from the jam-packed Herzliya schedule and corridor talk. “Israelis seem to like things just as they are,” he said.

Last year, the Palestine Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas addressed the gathering. This year, there is but one panel scheduled on the long-stalled talks, and the most senior Palestinian planning to attend the gathering—indeed, one of the only Palestinian officials scheduled to attend—is Yasser Abed Rabbo, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Secretary General.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave a much-criticized keynote speech last year, is not scheduled to speak. Nor is Defense Minister ]]> http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/58263/herzliya-diary-2/feed/ 6 http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/56562/breaking-free/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=breaking-free http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/56562/breaking-free/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:00:39 +0000 Shoshana Kordova http://www.tabletmag.com/?p=56562 Israelispeak is the way Israelis and the Israeli media use Hebrew. Behind the literal meaning, there’s an additional web of suggestion, doublespeak, and cultural innuendo that too often gets lost in translation. Every Friday, we reveal what is really being said. To view all the entries in this series, click here.

“Declaration of Independence,” reads the headline of a column in an Israeli paper about Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s recent decision to break from the Labor Party. “The new faction that calls itself Atzmaut”—Independence—“is essentially on its way toward losing its political independence, since in the absence of political power, it will have to support the government without any real objections,” former Israeli politician Uzi Baram opines.

“Independence” is one of those words that you can throw around in a sentence for an easy double entendre—as malleable as the party itself. When Barak announced his defection from Labor, his speech included the words, “We are going forth today toward independence.” And also, we are meant to presume, Independence.

In choosing a single catchy part of everyday vocabulary, Barak followed in the footsteps of Ariel Sharon. As prime minister, Sharon split off from a party beset by deep-seated disagreements over his plan to withdraw from Gaza (even though the name of that party, Likud, translates to “Unification”). Partly as a way to circumvent the so-called party “rebels” who were making every effort to block the disengagement plan, in 2005 Sharon created Kadima—which means “forward” or “onward.” Thus were born memorable campaign slogans like “Kadima with Sharon,” as well as counter-slogans like “Kadima is Backward.” Now, of course, the Forward party is warming the back benches.

Barak’s maneuver this week—and this should sound familiar—essentially hijacked a plan by “rebels” in the Labor Party to create their own breakaway movement. One recent column managed to squeeze in double-edged references to Kadima and Atzmaut in the same paragraph: Discussing Barak’s decision to keep Labor in the Netanyahu government—when quitting Bibi might have won Labor more votes in the next election—media consultant Amos Sarig argues that Barak should have “looked ahead [kadima]” and joined Kadima as an autonomous faction, but that the political leader “preferred his own independence [atzmaut]” instead.

Barak might have cribbed a page from Sharon’s playbook, but at least he had the sense not to jinx himself by giving his party an energetic name like, say, Vigor. You might know that party better by its Hebrew name, Meretz, which seems to have expended most of its vitality on losing seats in the Knesset. As for the future of Atzmaut, only time will tell if it succeeds in securing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the people of Israel.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: After Shabbat
Haredization
‘Filipinit’
On Fire
Cast Lead
Refugees
On Strike
‘Politi’
Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

More than a decade ago, when you took the stage at some crowded Tel Aviv banquet hall and gave your first speech as Israel’s prime minister-elect, I was standing in the back of the room, pressed against many of my friends, all of us dirty and exhausted. We had spent the previous weeks darting from street to street, putting up fliers, canvassing, doing whatever we could to convince whomever listened that you were a far better alternative to Benjamin Netanyahu. And when you won, by a landslide, we were all thrilled; after the bumbling Shimon Peres and the sinister Bibi, you were, we thought, just the man we needed. When you spoke of your election as the dawn of a new day, we believed you.

Earlier this week, as I sipped my morning coffee and watched you announce your decision to leave the Labor party, found an independent faction, and remain in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, the first thought that came to my mind was that quick, sweaty handshake you gave me as you were inching your way out of the room on the night of your victory in 1999. That evening, you had won the confidence of 670,484 Israelis, or 20 percent of voters, representing 26 seats in the Knesset. Exactly 10 years later, in your most recent electoral challenge, the numbers were very different: 334,900 votes, less than 10 percent of the voting public, 13 Knesset seats. In the course of 10 years of leadership, dear Ehud, you’ve cut your party’s electoral strength by exactly half, a disgrace very few other Western politicians can claim.

Momentous as your political failure is, it is not much of a factor in the profound and bubbling contempt I feel for you, a visceral enmity that few of your colleagues have inspired in my otherwise tranquil political imagination. Nor am I too hung up on your record as the squanderer-in-chief of precious opportunities, from peace with Syria—which you bumbled after flying to Washington, getting cold feet, refusing to disembark from your plane, and sending the Clinton Administration into a rage—to talks with the Palestinians, which you largely doomed with your impulsive, poorly thought-out decision to try to resolve a century-long conflict in two make-or-break weeks. What I resent more than anything, Ehud, is your catastrophic misunderstanding of the burdens of leadership.

You are, I know, a reader; you like to boast about having polished off James Joyce’s Ulysses in a matter of hours, a bit of bravado that seemed appealing when I was young and seems pathetic now. But take a look, then, at this week’s parasha—there’s a lesson there about leadership you cannot afford to ignore. As the story begins, Moses, groaning under the burden of being the sole leader of nearly a half-million people, is visited by his father-in-law, Jethro. The latter is quick with advice: “The thing you are doing is not good,” he tells Moses. “You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people who are with you, for the matter is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” The solution Jethro suggests is simple, and it involves deputizing competent leaders and judges and setting up a structured hierarchy.

You were preoccupied this week with emptily comparing yourself to past leaders, from David Ben Gurion to Ariel Sharon; you might want to reach further back into Jewish history and take a page from Moses. Seeing the merit in Jethro’s suggestion, Moses immediately cedes much of his own power. He understands that good governments, and good governors, are those capable of shaking the unshakable feeling that they alone know what’s best. You, Ehud, have allowed that false feeling of omnipotence to shake you.

In 2005, when you announced your return to politics, you told participants in an online Q&A that you and only you were capable of resuscitating the Labor Party, and that you anticipated winning as many as 35 Knesset seats. That never happened, and your reappointment, in 2007, as minister of defense brought with it a spirit of repression and arrogance that many close to you have decried, remembering, for example, how you had once told a well-respected and knowledgeable general who disagreed with your analysis to sit down and shut up. You treated your political colleagues with the same imperious impatience; when they disagreed with you, you accused them of being post-modern—as if Labor was manned by Jean Baudrillard and Jürgen Habermas rather than Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and Isaac Herzog—and left, leaving the party to lick the wounds you yourself had inflicted.

In light of all this, you might find Moses’ behavior puzzling. In giving up his power willingly, he, after all, is the ultimate freyer, or sucker, a character trait you’ve repeatedly mocked. Maybe, then, you should skip ahead in the parasha and get to its truly astonishing part: Designating the Israelites as his chosen people, God has his own thoughts about the nature of governance. “And now,” says the Lord, “if you obey Me and keep My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasure out of all peoples, for Mine is the entire earth. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of princes and a holy nation.”

Imagine that, Ehud—a whole kingdom of priests, a holy nation moved by the spirit, with little need for guidance and less for small men with large egos. These days, we’re seeing sparks of this utopian vision in the Middle East far away from Israel, in embattled Tunisia. As the citizens of that country fight to unburden themselves of the onus of a corrupt, despotic, and incompetent leadership, the world, for the most part, is deeply supportive. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, urged the Tunisian government to reflect “the wishes and aspirations of Tunisian people,” and the Arab League called on “all political forces, representatives of Tunisian society and officials to stand together and unite to maintain the achievements of the Tunisian people.” The word out of Jerusalem was distinctly different. Netanyahu expressed his concern about the popular uprising jeopardizing the “stability” in the region, while his deputy, the Tunisian-born Silvan Shalom, focused on the fate of the country’s approximately 2,000 Jews, as if the rest of those taking a risk and lifting their voices were negligible.

A Tunisian-style popular reform movement terrifies Netanyahu and Shalom, men whose careers are firmly rooted in the arid ground of the status quo. And I imagine it terrifies you, too: There’s little room in a kingdom of priests for bonapartes and solipsists. But the people are in the streets in Tunis, and they might soon be in the streets in Tel Aviv, too, tired of the corruption and opportunism and perfidiousness of their rotting political class. When that happens, don’t bother turning to this week’s parasha for inspiration. It would be too late.

Sincerely,

L. Leibovitz

Against this glum backdrop, there is only one success story: the Palestinian Authority’s state-building effort, a unique example of positive Palestinian achievement in the fields of security, economics, and institution-building. Given that bilateral talks appear to have failed, the state-building plan has a political endgame—international recognition of a Palestinian state—that must be addressed soon. What’s more, it holds out the possibility of serving Israeli as well as Palestinian interests.

This is not the sort of unilateral declaration of independence that was trumpeted in the 1990s by Yasser Arafat. In contrast, this Palestinian plan is to be activated only if and when the institutions of state are in place in the West Bank and bilateral peace talks are deemed to have failed. Happily, the institutions increasingly are in place; sadly, the U.S.-sponsored peace talks are already a failure. At some point next September, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people, will have built up sufficient diplomatic momentum through the recognition of statehood by a growing community of nations that it is almost certain to ask the United Nations for recognition of a state within the 1967 borders, including Jerusalem.

Notably, the PLO is not expected to ask the United Nations to pronounce on refugees and their right of return or on control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This is important: These two existential issues have been the biggest deal breakers in the repeated attempts to negotiate a comprehensive settlement, both officially and in informal meetings, attempts with which I have been associated for more than two decades.

For it is here that the narratives of Israel and the PLO clash most resoundingly—even as the two parties agree on the need for two states side by side. In direct talks, the PLO insists there can be no formal deal on borders without Jerusalem acquiescing to a right-of-return agreement that certifies for future generations that Israel was “born in sin” in 1948. And it demands (because “there never was a temple there”) that Israel cede full sovereignty and control over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians. But within the framework of a unilateral/international partial solution at the United Nations, the PLO is prepared to postpone resolution of precisely these two issues in order to achieve a two-state solution.

In responding to this Palestinian plan, which is coordinated fully with the Arab League, Israel is in a paradoxical position. On the one hand, it supports the Palestinian Authority’s state-building program; on the other, it opposes the PLO’s effort to recruit international support for a U.N. declaration of Palestinian statehood. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government appears to be relying on an American veto in the Security Council. Yet this is not at all a certainty: The Obama Administration takes a much more international approach to Middle East issues than did its predecessors, and it is clearly unhappy with Netanyahu’s policies. Note that last fall, in the course of efforts to persuade Netanyahu to extend the settlement freeze, President Barack Obama reportedly offered to oppose Palestinian efforts in the United Nations as long as active peace talks continued. This can be understood to mean that, without active peace talks, there is no promise of a veto.

As matters currently stand, a Palestinian statehood resolution is almost certain to reach the Security Council with the massive backing of the international community. If the United States does veto it, Israel’s international isolation and de-legitimization will be severely exacerbated. If Washington doesn’t use the veto but Israel opposes the resolution, Jerusalem will find itself totally isolated and at the center of a major international controversy over a U.N. decision to recognize a Palestinian state that Israel opposes.

***

There is one obvious alternative. Israel and the United States could begin, now, discussing ways in which U.N. creation of a Palestinian state could be leveraged by Israel to serve its larger purposes. Jerusalem and Washington could set about ensuring that the relevant Security Council resolution, along with U.S.-Israeli side agreements, reflect Israel’s strategic interests. This could conceivably be an opportunity to put Israel and the United States, and potentially the Palestinians and the Arab League as well, on the same page.

Israel and the United States would ensure that U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders would also include a mandate to that state and to Israel to negotiate land swaps, security and water provisions, disposition of Israeli settlements remaining in Palestinian territory, and to work out the parameters for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. The holy places in Jerusalem and elsewhere and resolution of the refugee issue would only be addressed once a Palestinian state begins functioning. But the creation of that state based on international recognition of successful Palestinian state-building would not be dependent on solving these issues.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict would then become a state-to-state issue—no longer a conflict between Israel and an elusive and problematic nonstate actor, the PLO, that represents the Palestinian diaspora. Mahmoud Abbas would negotiate with Israel as president of Palestine, not chairman of the PLO. The U.N. resolution that creates the state of Palestine would be worded to refer back to Resolution 181 of 1947, which created “Arab and Jewish states” in mandatory Palestine and to reaffirm U.N. recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Israel could leverage its agreement and seek out significant security benefits from the United States to compensate it for the risks it would be taking. It could also bargain for incentives from the Arab League, whose Arab Peace Initiative offers Israel normalization and security in return for peace and for whom the emergence of a Palestinian state could conceivably open new channels of cooperation with Israel against Iran and the militant Islamist movements it fosters. Israel could, together with Washington, identify and neutralize any potential negative ramifications posed by international legal aspects of the emergence of a Palestinian state by dint of U.N. decree. Whatever bilateral talks Washington succeeds in convening between now and next September could be channeled toward facilitating the territorial aspects of U.N. creation of a Palestinian state.

Obviously, there are also drawbacks to the approach outlined here. It would only produce a partial, not final agreement, thereby leaving aspects of the conflict to fester. While the Gaza Strip would undoubtedly be declared a part of the state of Palestine, it would remain a separate and dangerous problem. Then, too, this is a best-case scenario that could go wrong; reliance on an international track could turn into a slippery slope for Israel, wherein Jerusalem loses control over the process.

Yet these dangers must be assessed not only in the context of U.N. creation of a Palestinian state but also against the backdrop of the likely alternative—the present situation. The absence of either a peace process or a Palestinian state almost certainly means an eventual return to violence. Hamas in Gaza threatens both Israel and the West Bank-based PLO whether or not a Palestinian state emerges. And Israel showed in 2005, during the Gaza withdrawal, and 2006, ending the war in Lebanon, that it is increasingly ready and able to work with the international community—but also to put on the brakes when necessary—if for no other reason than its inability to come up on its own with viable military or political strategies for dealing with the nonstate actors on its borders.

The current failure of the peace process and the risks for Israel that this project represents should impel both Washington and Jerusalem to engage urgently in an analytical exercise:

First, the two countries must acknowledge that the present approach for ending the conflict with a single agreement has, like its predecessors since 1993, failed.

Second, they must recognize that the Palestinian/Arab League plan for international recognition of a Palestinian state, backed by universally approved achievements in state-building in the West Bank, is gaining momentum and will confront Israel and the United States with a major challenge.

Third, they must acknowledge the dangers for Israel of an American veto of a Security Council resolution to recognize a Palestinian state, or, alternatively, of an American “yes” vote at the United Nations that is not coordinated with Israel on the basis of a joint effort to leverage the U.N. resolution to Israel’s advantage.

And finally, they must understand that the state-recognition plan embodies risks but also potential advantages for Israel and for U.S. interests in the region, which can and should be leveraged.

In short, it’s time we began talking seriously about this contingency.

Yossi Alpher, who edits Bitterlemons, is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. In 2000, he served as special adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Camp David talks.

• Last night, Paul Giamatti won the Golden Globe for Best Actor (Musical or Comedy) for his role in super-Jewy Barney’s Version. [Hollywood Outbreak]

• The other daily magazine of Jewish life and culture profiles Reboot, the organization for Jews rediscovering their Jewishness. [NYT]

• On Sarah Palin’s missed opportunity. [Goldblog]

• This Israeli dance troupe made up of five Orthodox men is just waiting for The Full Monty treatment. [NYT]

• TheJMom.com is literally every Jewish boy’s worst nightmare. No but like literally. [Jewcy]

Real Jew Gwyneth Paltrow plays non-Jew Taylor Swift playing a bar mitzvah (on SNL).

What you may not know, and what top Haaretz reporters Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff explain today in Tablet Magazine, is that, in addition to the above distinctions, Barak is “Israel’s most widely loathed public figure,” broadly viewed as aloof, corrupt, and partly responsible for numerous Israeli errors over the past decade or two, including the failure to make peace at Camp David and the Second Intifada.

Nine Lives

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak bolted the Labor Party, taking a few ministers with him, to form his own, smaller, centrist party while staying in the governing coalition. [NYT]

• Sarah Palin stood by her remarks on the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords while regretting her use of the phrase “blood libel.” Just kidding! She said her critics were “using anything they could gather out of [the] statement,” like, for example, its invocation, however inadvertant, of a centuries-old justification of violence against Jews. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Then again, maybe, per Jean-Marie Le Pen’s theory, I’m just crying wolf. [JTA]

• The Palestinian leadership continues to insist it will present an anti-settlement draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council. [JPost]

• Giffords’s breathing tube was removed as she continues to make progress, albeit while still in critical condition. [JPost]

Comparing himself to David Ben Gurion and Ariel Sharon, Barak announced that he would be leaving the Labor party along with another minister and three other Knesset members to establish a new center-Zionist “Independence Party,” which would remain part of Netanyahu’s government. The move was planned in secret by Barak and Netanyahu, and it immediately shored up the governing Likud coalition by depriving the left-wing members of the Labor Party, which Barak left behind, of any leverage against the prime minister. The three remaining Labor ministers in the Netanyahu government reacted by immediately quitting it.

While Sharon’s split from the Likud to form Kadima in 2005 was a move made to advance a particular political agenda, many observers saw Barak’s maneuver as a characteristic piece of selfishness whose intended beneficiary was Barak himself. And it will likely further lower the reputation of Israel’s most widely loathed public figure. A few months ago, a panel of journalists and experts was convened by the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’ir to select the most hated Israeli. Out of 50 contestants—including Netanyahu and other politicians and media personalities—the hands-down winner was Barak.

Such mocking disregard might surprise non-Israelis. Barak enjoys enormous respect in the international community, where he is almost universally considered to be the most responsible and serious member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. And because the widely disliked Avigdor Lieberman is Israel’s foreign minister, Barak also serves as Israel’s de facto diplomat-in-chief; last month, he made his ninth visit to the United States in three years. Barak remains the Obama Administration’s main point of contact in Israel’s government, and, although his relationship with President Bill Clinton has been thorny at times, these days both Clintons (including the now-more important one, Hillary) seem to think highly of him. Nearly all of the relevant administration officials—including Dennis Ross, now Clinton’s special envoy for the region, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—have known and respected Barak for two decades and clear time on their schedules for him whenever he passes through Washington.

And yet within Israel, the verdict of Ha’ir’s unpopularity contest surprised no one. Barak is now enjoying unparalleled status as a public punching bag; indeed, it is doubtful that any other Israeli politician has achieved lower popularity in recent years—quite a feat, given the competition from figures like the brutish Lieberman, the corrupt and incompetent Ehud Olmert, and the blinkered leadership of Shas. The contempt in which Barak is held is even more astonishing when one considers his pedigree: He is one of the three most decorated officers in the history of the IDF and holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and math and a master’s degree in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University. He is even, some claim, a very capable amateur pianist. But all of his credentials and talents have never translated to more than a rudimentary ability to connect with people. Barak, an oft-told joke goes, will one day commit suicide by leaping from his IQ to his EQ.

Indeed, dislike for the current defense minister has become so ingrained in the Israeli psyche that his own political handlers have tried to ride the wave rather than fight it: Two years ago, when Barak’s campaign for prime minister ran into a ditch during Knesset elections, his aides fought back with a series of advertisements portraying Barak as “not a sahbak”—the Arabic word meaning friend or “man of the people”—but as “a leader.” The meaning was clear: You might not want to make small talk with Barak at a party, or invite him over to watch soccer on TV, but you might at least trust him to be a responsible grown-up.

The ads did little good. Labor won only 13 Knesset seats (out of 120)—an all-time low for the party. And these days, the most common expression describing Barak is another Arabic term: ahabal, an idiot or fool. In November, Ofer Eini—a member of Histadrut, Barak’s own party—lobbed the now-infamous insult at Barak during a television interview. Eini was responding to a question about the scandal du jour, that Barak’s wife, Nili Barak-Priel, had been caught employing an illegal maid from the Philippines. “Barak has this quality: He never misses a mistake,” claimed Eini. “You’re a member of the government. What the hell do you bring a Philippine worker for? Employ an Israeli one. You should set an example. You need to be an ahabal to do such a thing, really! You know it’s against the law. Did you think that they wouldn’t catch you? Well, they did.” Eini’s language was harsh, but the expression stuck, summing up what large swaths of the Israeli public believe to be an inglorious and costly string of mistakes, both personal and public.

“There’s something slightly autistic about him,” admits a senior official in Israel’s defense administration, who has known Barak for decades. “He hardly listens to criticism, least of all when he’s convinced that he’s right and everybody else is wrong.” Still, one-on-one, Barak is very convincing and, until very recently, public opinion polls showed an interesting pattern: Most Israelis trusted him as a defense minister, though not as a possible prime minister.

Now almost no one trusts him, in either role.

***

By all accounts, Barak’s problems began a decade ago, during his term as prime minister, which is widely seen by Israelis as an unqualified disaster. After an unprecedented 12-point victory over Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1999, Barak managed to squander nearly all of his public support outside the Labor Party within 20 months as prime minister during which he delivered only one crucial, strategic decision: the unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, which ended 18 years of Israeli occupation. But he then promised to try and achieve regional peace “in 15 months”—and failed miserably. Negotiations with Syria reached a dead end, and the July 2000 Camp David peace summit with the Palestinians famously achieved nothing. Barak went to Camp David supported by only a quarter of Knesset members, and he avoided an immediate ouster only because the summit was held during the Knesset’s summer recess. The peace talks failed not because of Barak, but because Yasser Arafat refused to compromise—a conclusion supported by Bill Clinton, who gave full backing to Barak’s accusations against the PLO chairman. But Arafat can’t have been encouraged by the prospect of compromise with a leader who was clearly a political lame duck. Barak’s string of political failures got even longer two months later, when the second Intifada broke out, plunging the country into nightmarish violence and leading most Israelis to blame the prime minister for being both naïve and unprepared.

Barak was able to make a political comeback—of sorts. After the IDF’s fiasco during the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Amir Peretz, then head of the Labor Party and minister of defense, was widely criticized as unfit for his job. In May 2007, Barak quickly maneuvered him out of both the Labor leadership and the defense ministry, taking his place in Ehud Olmert’s government. Now Barak had a new problem: During his six years out of government, he had been mainly occupied with his flourishing business career. His affluence wasn’t easily accepted by Israeli voters, who generally believe that the leader of what is still supposed to be a workers’ party should not be worth millions of dollars (and be seen flaunting his wealth). To be fair, Barak’s focus on his business career while out of office was no different from Netanyahu’s (and was certainly less outrageous than Olmert’s). But for Barak, an image of ostentatious luxury was quite damaging—and was not helped by his purchase of a $10 million apartment at Tel Aviv’s most luxurious high-rise. Whatever sympathy and forgiveness he received from the Israeli electorate upon his return was soon replaced by contempt.

It didn’t take long for Barak and Olmert to grab for each other’s throats. Serving in the same government, the former friends quickly found each other intolerable. Olmert became embroiled in a series of corruption scandals (he is now standing trial for some of these), and Barak eventually demanded his resignation, forcing the prime minister to retire. But even before this final break, it seemed impossible for Olmert and Barak to agree on anything. In February 2009, Olmert refused to surrender to Barak’s pressure and approve a deal with Hamas in which Israel would release a thousand Palestinian prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit. When Israel invaded parts of the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, Barak’s resistance prevented Olmert from gambling on a full-scale reoccupation of the Strip, which Olmert had hoped would lead to the final defeat of Hamas in Gaza. At this point, there emerged a fierce—and still ongoing—argument between Barak and Olmert, hard to decipher because of restrictions by Israeli military censorship, about the decision-making process before certain Israeli actions abroad, which international media organizations have assumed refers to the successful bombing of a Syrian nuclear plant in September 2007, which Olmert is said to have championed, and Barak, it is implied, opposed.

Yet after Olmert stepped down as prime minister, it began to appear that the only Israeli politician that Barak could get along with was himself. When Tzipi Livni, Olmert’s successor as head of the Kadima party, tried to form a new coalition, Barak did not go out of his way to help her. During the election campaign, he publicly insulted Livni by calling her by “Tzipora”—her full name, but also widely seen as an anachronistic grandmotherly moniker—in a radio interview. He notably withheld even cursory approval for Livni’s performance while trying to raise the same argument Hillary Clinton first used against Barack Obama, asking, in political advertisements, “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” The answer of the Israeli electorate seemed clear: anybody but you.

***

And so, the defense minister’s new image has gradually consolidated: arrogant, aloof, condescending, a habitual intriguer against his fellow ministers and political partners who is constantly accused of corruption, although, unlike many of his colleagues, he has never been indicted for any crime. Even his experience in defense matters—his greatest public asset—has evaporated in the eyes of most voters. His personal friction with Olmert prevented him from playing a bigger role in that government, and his public support has collapsed during Netanyahu’s term.

Yet in spite of his obvious political weakness—or because of it—his personal relationship with Netanyahu is surprisingly good. Both men, each of whom had an unpleasant term as prime minister during the 1990s, seem to have gotten beyond their past confrontations, perhaps brought together by shared antipathy for their fellow politicians and for the press. As Netanyahu’s point man in the United States diplomatic and defense establishments, Barak’s importance is much greater than his party’s role in the coalition might suggest. As a result, Netanyahu has given Barak almost unlimited freedom to deal with military issues and has listened to most of the defense minister’s advice regarding the peace process.

Continue reading: “Mr. Defense,” the quarrel with Gabi Ashkenazi, and Israel’s Mr. Unpopularity. Or view as a single page.

The report attacked Israel’s firefighting service as the weak link in Israel’s civil emergency forces. It also set the blame squarely on embattled Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the ultra-religious Shas party, as well as on Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Yishai, for his part, used the report to suggest that the fault lay in “all of Israel’s previous governments” (Ben-Gurion might as well have fertilized the forest with gasoline). He, meanwhile, was the unsung hero of the disaster.

“The media lynched me,” Yishai said. “If there was a non-Haredi minister in the interior ministry, he would be staring in all the media outlets and they would have said to him: ‘How you predicted, how you shouted out.’ Here the situation is opposite.”

Livni Slams PM’s Handling of Fires as ‘Media Act’ [JPost]
State Comptroller Blames Eli Yishai For Collapse of Firefighting Services [Haaretz]
Fire Services Report Shows Israel Unready For War, Again [Haaretz]
Earlier: What Israel Lost in the Fire

The quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables leaked through the Wikileaks organization and published yesterday in several newspapers mostly revealed that our worst fears, grounded in things we already knew, are shared by State Department professionals privy to non-public information (although over half of the leaked cables were not classified). They are the geopolitical equivalent of Kinsley gaffes, slip-ups embarassing precisely because they confirm what people already thought to be true.

The Times’s lead bulletpoint, for instance, describes U.S. concerns that Pakistan has enriched uranium that could be used to make illicit weapons for very bad people. Well, we knew Pakistan was a nuclear state; that the father of the Pakistani bomb, A.Q. Khan, is the world’s worst individual proliferator; that Pakistan maintains alliances with radical Islamic groups (like the one that murdered hundreds in Mumbai). So this new tidbit, of “a dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel,” is scary, but it is not shocking.

Or as Laura Rozen put it, “The classified diplomatic discussions on Iran revealed in the cables are not all that different from what one would expect from following the public comments senior U.S. officials have made on the Iran issue the last several months.” I will address other revelations, including ones touching on the Mideast peace process, Egypt, and Turkey, in a future post. The Iran stuff has been among the most buzzed-about.

We learn that Iran is being armed by North Korea with far more sophisticated missiles than was thought they had. This is alarming, of course. It also might help explain why Russia has been on-board sanctions efforts—those suckers could reach Moscow. I haven’t seen any cables that definitively pinpoint where Iran is in terms of effectively weaponizing nuclear technology, though they do suggest that U.S. diplomats believe Israel is overstating just how close Iran is.

The leaders of Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are if anything even more bullish on attacking Iran’s facilities than Israel—a revelation that certainly provides a frisson of vindication to hawks and Israel especially. But surprising? Tablet Magazine contributing editors Jeffrey Goldberg and David Samuels, as well as basic common sense, have long supposed that Arab states fear the non- and at times anti-Arab regional hegemon’s going nuclear, and would love to see it disrupted in a manner such that they can have plausible deniability (indeed, even plausible condemnability)—such as, say, a limited U.S. attack. King Abdullah said, regarding Iran, that the United States should “cut off the head of the snake.” Dramatic? You bet. Puzzling? Not really. As Tablet Magazine contributor Yossi Melman wrote, “It would have been sufficient to read pundits and journalists who cover the Mideast to see that everyone is in agreement on this issue. Everyone would like to see the United States bomb Iran.”

In early 2009, we learn, Israeli Defense Minister Barak implied to the U.S. that Israel might feel the need to strike before the end of 2010, after which collateral damage could become unacceptable. (One month to go!) This threat may have been designed chiefly to prod the United States to action (certainly this was among its goals); and even if it was based on a clear-eyed assessment of available intelligence, such intelligence came from over 18 months ago, before sanctions and sabotage and Stuxnet and presumably updated intelligence.

We learn that Mossad head Meir Dagan has been a longtime lobbyist for trying to topple Iran’s regime through various Iranian minority groups.

We learn that Supreme Leader Khamanei has terminal leukemia. Of course, that’s from a cable that dates into last year, so who knows.

Finally (for now), we learn that Iran uses the Iranian Red Crescent (their version of the Red Cross) to smuggle weapons and agents into Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Even those with uncharitable views of the Iranian leadership can be excused for being a bit chilled at just how low this is.

A thought: If these revelations don’t surprise you, smug vindication isn’t the best response—steadfast determination to hope for and work toward a good resolution of the Iranian crisis is. And if these revelations do surprise you, stubborn resolve to ignore them isn’t the best response—acknowledgement that there is such a thing as the Iranian crisis is.

Iran Stirs Distress in Mideast [NYT]

• Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to cut his own deal to get Interior Minister Eli Yishai, of Shas, to okay the extension and Defense Minister Barak, of Labor, to okay the approval of certain units after the new freeze would expire. [Ynet]

• A closer look at the implications of Israeli’s planned and approved withdrawal from the Lebanese village of Ghajar, which is near the Golan and occupied primarily by members of the Alawite sect, whose members rule nearby Syria. [NYT]

• The U.S. chairman of the joint chiefs of staffs insisted that Iran policy consists of “dialogue, engagement, and sanctions,” and that military action is in only some distant future, if at all. [JTA]

• There have been allegations that German government policy favors Liberal (i.e., Reform) Judaism over the Orthodox. [NYT]

• Um, the Steven Rosen vs. AIPAC lawsuit … depicted in anime. [Capitol J]

Wilf forced the issue because yesterday was the tenth anniversary of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, which “urges Member States to ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict.” Of course, U.N. resolutions are not uncontroversial matters in Israel, and indeed the main group that pushes adherence to 1325, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, is a pacifist outfit that was highly critical of Israel’s conduct during the Gaza conflict. (The group’s prominence on the issue also meant that one article read, “Wilf did not mention WILPF.”)

Meanwhile, those looking for tea leaves into Israel’s confusing coalition politics will note Defense Minister and Labor leader Ehud Barak’s response to Livni: “Today there are no longer negotiations, and it is not unthinkable that when there are, we will add a woman,” he said. “In that case, I prefer Tzipi Livni and not [Likud MK] Tzipi Hotovely.”

‘Women Should Be More Involved in Peace Negotiations [JPost]
Labor MK Wants Women in Peace Talks [Arutz Sheva]
Related: Q&A: Tzipi Livni [Tablet Magazine]

Born in Jericho, on the West Bank, raised under Israeli military occupation, and educated in Arizona (where he received an undergraduate degree in finance and then an MBA), Areikat toggles back and forth between the somber acknowledgment of competing narratives of nationhood and oppression, sharp political gossip, and more muted versions of the fiery speeches about colonization and dispossession that made the secular Palestinian national cause a favorite among Western students in the 1970s, in the days before Islamists seized the mantle of resistance.

Yet for all the fluidity of his style and the intelligence of his presentation, there is something insubstantial about Areikat that seems less like a personal failing than a product of the fact that his title is a well-meaning lie: He is an ambassador without a country, the emissary of a dream-state without borders that has commanded and frustrated the imagination of the world for over 40 years. The deferral of the Palestinian national dream through war and peace, international conferences and agreements, self-inflicted wounds, settlement and occupation, year after year and decade after decade, has become one of the defining characteristics of a dream that refuses to die yet resists being born. The delivery date is always pushed back another year or two, and then another year. Arguments about whether the failure lies with Israel or the Palestinians, Arafat, Sharon, Clinton, Bush or Obama, meddling Iranians, Likud hardliners, Baruch Goldstein or Hamas, the Holocaust, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, or the Sykes Picot agreement of 1916 have lost their savor even for the bitterest ideologues. The world won’t stand for it any longer, but then the world moves on to something else. With the West Bank ruled by the Israel Defense Forces and Gaza ruled by Hamas, the Palestinian people seem more divided now than at any time since their national movement began.

Areikat displays excellent control over his body language and enjoys playing games. When I arrive to meet him in the lounge of a busy tourist hotel in midtown Manhattan, I find him seated with a glass of water in front of him and his jacket and tie slung over the back of the opposite chair. He watches me, curious to see whether I will ask his permission, move it myself, or sit down and then lean forward for the rest of the interview. When I move his jacket to a nearby chair, he smiles and then stands up to shake my hand, while continuing to talk on his cell phone to Ramallah in Arabic about his meeting with the editorial board of the New York Times. I set out the instruments of my trade on the table and listen in on his conversation until he is done.

For decades many Jews in Israel and America denied that there was such a thing as a Palestinian people. I think that most people in our community today see that as a shameful thing. However even as the Jewish community has stopped for the most part propagating this kind of false and insulting narrative, we wonder why there is not a similar recognition on the part of Palestinians of our deep historical and emotional connection to our national homeland.

One hundred years of struggle over that piece of land that was called Palestine produced a lot of misconceptions and misperceptions. We witnessed the rise of national movements that were struggling to create homelands for their own people, and neither one wanted to acknowledge the presence of the other. I think of the early Zionist slogans of a land without a people for a people without a land, all the books and the papers and the statements that were made by the early Zionists and the Israelis after the creation of the state of Israel, the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people, and then later the denial by the Palestinians of the existence of the state of Israel, that they have to go back to where they came from. I remember former Prime Minister Golda Meir saying that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people in the early ’70s. I remember Palestinians saying that the only Jews in the land of Palestine are going to be Palestinian Jews. I think the bloody conflict brought leaders on both sides to their senses. We have seen at least, from the Palestinian side, since 1988, a clear acceptance of the existence of the State of Israel.

I wrote a cover story for the Atlantic about the Ra’is, Yasser Arafat right after he died, and I interviewed all the Palestinian leaders who were close to Arafat, as well as the leading Israeli, American, and international policymakers who dealt with him. One story that I heard many times is how the Camp David negotiations fell apart when Arafat would not acknowledge that there was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

This was used by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in his recent op-ed in the New York Times, and I just want to know, how did he base his statement. On what information?

Bill Clinton tells the story, too. I also interviewed Madeleine Albright and Ehud Barak about it, and they said the same thing. They remembered that Clinton was very angry. He said, “Look, it was in the Encyclopedia Britannica, how can you say it was not there?” And Arafat said, “There was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. It didn’t exist. It’s a myth. Maybe it was in Hebron. Maybe the Jews came from Saudi Arabia.” You know the kind of nonsense he used to talk.

People forget that Chairman Arafat was the first Palestinian leader to take the major risk of signing an agreement with Israel that recognized Israel’s right to exist. I don’t think there would have been any other Palestinian leader who would have had the courage to do that. And they just, in a moment of rage because you know he didn’t go along with a plan that was submitted to him at Camp David, decide to make him the bad guy.

OK. Now that we are sitting across the table here in New York 10 years later, under completely different circumstances, let me ask you this: Was there ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem?

I’m not a historian.

I have the reference right here from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Is it wrong?

I’m not a historian.  What are you trying to get to? That Jews were present then?

Were they?

President Abbas in his meeting with the leaders of the American Jewish community in June said that yes, the Jews were in the Middle East, and that one-third of the Quran talks about Jews.

Are the people who say they’re Israeli Jews today related to the people who were Jews in the time of the Quran?

It’s for historians to establish the link. I believe many Jews who lived at one point in that land continue to live in that land, and their descendants stayed in that land.

So, today’s Palestinians are the real Jews?

Everywhere in the world, Jews follow the nationality and citizenship of the country where they live. In the United States, you have American Jews, who live in the United States. You have French Jews. And this was the original argument between us and the Jews. Why can’t you be Palestinian Jews?

Is Judaism simply a religion, or are Jews also a people—like Kurds or Armenians?

That is something you have to work out for yourselves. At one point, we believed that Jews are followers of religion, and not a nation and a people, and I’ll tell you why. In order to be one people, one nation, you have to be homogenous. Look at Jews all over the world, you see American Jews who are blond and with green-blue eyes. You see Yemeni Jews who are dark like me with brown eyes and brown hair—not brown anymore for me—and you see French and Russian Jews who are a mixture of this and that. So, basically a lot of historians on the Palestinian side and the Arab side say, “Well, if they were a people, one nation, they would be homogenous, 90 percent alike except for 10 not-alike, as we Palestinians are.” Some of us still make the same arguments of the ’60s and the ’70s: “No, they are not a nation, they are the followers of a faith, they should live in every country as citizens of that country.”

That approach didn’t work out so well for us in Europe.

I think you have been very much influenced by the Holocaust. And the thing that my Jewish listeners, audience, or readers should understand is that we Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. As a matter of fact, Palestinians, in the early years of the Jewish migration to Palestine, tried to help the Jewish immigrants as much as possible, to make them feel at home.

In our community, we’re taught that the toleration of Jews in most Muslim empires was greater than it was in Christian Europe. But we also hear that, for example, the other day the head of the Palestine National Council, Salim Zanoun, said that the Palestinian people can never recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

I said it yesterday!

Why did you say that?

Israel is a political establishment that claims to represent Jews all over the world. I very much doubt that Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu represent every Jew in the world. I know there are Jews who don’t agree with Netanyahu.

You know the saying: Two Jews, three opinions.

But what I want to say about tolerance is that the Jewish-Muslim relationship enjoyed much more years of peace and tranquility than the Christian-Jewish relationship or the Muslim-Christian relationship. My grandfather was a partner with a Jewish man in a bakery shop in west Jerusalem. When he was—when my grandfather left in 1948, he left everything, he left his home, he left his bakery, he left everything, but he was a partner. My mother used to tell me stories about how they lived in peace and harmony. That’s why a lot of people argue that the politicization of Judaism led to the friction and the conflict with the Palestinians. In the beginning we used to say, “We are not against Jews or Judaism.” We were against Zionism as a political theory.

So, explain why it’s impossible for the Palestinian people to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

We have no problem whatsoever with what Israel calls themselves. Israel can call themselves “The Great Empire of the Jewish People.” But don’t ask me to recognize that.

Why not? You want us to recognize the validity of your narrative of Palestinian people-hood.

We are still negotiating an end to this conflict. Let’s say that tomorrow the Palestinian leadership comes out and says, “OK, we’re ready to recognize the Jewishness of the state.” What implications would that have, immediately, on the Palestinians? You know that in our view the refugee problem is the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today we have 6.5 million registered refugees out of 10 or 10.5 million Palestinians. One out of six refugees in the world is Palestinian. By accepting Israel’s claim now, that they are a Jewish state, we are telling the Israelis: Forget about the refugees, forget about their plight, no right of return, no U.N. General Assembly resolution 194; we are giving up the refugee issue, we are taking it off the table before we even started negotiating.

Secondly, you know that there are between 18 and 20 percent non-Jews who are living in Israel, who are mostly Palestinians, and who are part of the Palestinian people. By accepting the Israeli plan that they are a Jewish state, we are undermining the rights of this minority, who are already suffering discrimination at the hands of the Israeli authorities.

Doesn’t the U.N. partition resolution on which you base your own national claims for a Palestinian state already recognize Israel as a state for the Jews—a Jewish state?

The partition plan of 1947, which I talked about yesterday at my speech at Columbia, did give 54 percent, 55 percent to a Jewish state, and 45 percent to an Arab state. The Arabs rejected that. Israel launched war and won the war, and they expanded their territory from 55 to 78, but the only time in my memory that a Jewish state was really mentioned was in the partition plan 181. Does Israel want us to go back to that? Fine.

So, you refuse to call Israel a Jewish state, but if they gave you more land it would be OK?

We’d be getting double the amount of land. Who would refuse that? But do you really want to turn that now into a political maneuver by trying to put forth a condition that you know in advance the Palestinians are not going to accept? The real issues are: ending the conflict, ending the Israeli military occupation, allowing the Palestinians to be independent, and providing security for Israel.

When you imagine a future Palestinian state, do you imagine it being a place where Jews, if they wish to become Palestinian citizens, could own property, vote in elections, and practice their religion freely?

I remember in the mid-’90s, the late [PLO official] Faisal Husseini said repeatedly “OK, if Israelis choose to stay in a future Palestinian state, they are more than welcome to do that. But under one condition: They have to respect and obey Palestinian laws, they cannot be living as Israelis. They have to respect Palestinian laws and abide by them.” When Faisal Husseini died, basically no Palestinian leader has publicly supported the notion that they can stay.

What we are saying is the following: We need to separate. We have to separate. We are in a forced marriage. We need to divorce. After we divorce, and everybody takes a period of time to recoup, rebound, whatever you want to call it, we may consider dating again.

So, you think it would be necessary to first transfer and remove every Jew—

Absolutely. No, I’m not saying to transfer every Jew, I’m saying transfer Jews who, after an agreement with Israel, fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state.

Any Jew who is inside the borders of Palestine will have to leave?

Absolutely. I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.

I’ve been traveling to the region since I was a child, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is that in the 1970s and 1980s Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs knew each other much better than they do now.

Following the Israeli occupation in 1967, the police station in my hometown of Jericho was headed by an Israeli police commander. I remember one time I went with two of my friends to a nearby Israeli settlement in Jericho, back in the ‘80s, to visit some Israelis who used to come to the shop and buy things from us. We’d have coffee and tea. The struggle was not crystallized yet.

I remember when I traveled to Europe in the late ’70s, and to the United States in the early ’80s, yes, we thought of ourselves as Palestinians, but we were traveling with Jordanian passports. Publicly we are Jordanians, but deep inside we are Palestinians.

That’s how many Jews feel about the passports that they carry.

I understand. When I talk to people about Israel’s obsession with security, I say I believe it’s genuine. I know that the Israelis exaggerate it. But I believe in many aspects it is genuine. I understand the horrific experience that Jews had during the Holocaust, but then I sit and say—

Your father didn’t do it.

Exactly. I am not the one. It was Germany. Germany was part of the Western community. I don’t want to get into religion, but they were Christians, not Muslims. Why should I pay the price for the political movement called Zionism, which said, “It’s time to reclaim parts of Palestinian territory that at one point were home for the kingdom of David, of Israel”—which you and I know was concentrated in the northern part of the West Bank. It never was in Jerusalem, it never was on the coast, it never was in Hebron.

Of course it was in Jerusalem.

No.

The City of David is right there.

No, I mean, it was from Shechem to the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was never the Palestine that they claim.

Continue reading: rockets, refugees, and “the idea that me and my family will come and live in your house.” Or view as a single page.

“I’m wonderful! I’m great!” chirps Rep. Shelley Berkley as she scoops ground coffee into a four-cup Black & Decker in her suburban Vegas home on the first morning of Rosh Hashanah. We’re headed out to stop at four different synagogues. “I’ve got to be the luckiest person in the world!” she says.

In this autumn of mass discontent with incumbents in general and Democrats in particular, the six-term congresswoman with nominal 2010 opposition is counting her blessings. At 59, she’s arrived at the place she’s always wanted to be, recognized as one of the most strident, hawkish pro-Israel voices in Washington while not sacrificing a bit of her brassy, Vegas-style pizzazz or otherwise strident left-leaning views. Even the evangelical Christian activist Gary Bauer says of Berkley: “Oh, I like her a lot. I think she’s gutsy, she’s articulate, she has a lot of flair.”

Indeed, her only real political quandary right now is whether to continue to, as she likes to say, bloom where she’s planted in the House of Representatives, or seek grander glory. She is Nevada’s only safe federal Democrat this year—a notable contrast, in particular, to her mentor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—and her state’s other Senate seat is likely to be contested in 2012 thanks to a sex scandal hounding its Republican occupant, John Ensign. She openly wonders whether she might do even more for her two primary causes, Nevada and Israel, from Congress’ upper chamber.

“I wouldn’t have a primary,” she tells a Chabad rabbi during our day together. “I would capture the Democratic primary without a problem. I have to decide if I’m willing to forgo a sure thing to go for the gold. If I lose, then I’m out. I’d be risking a lot.”

Few politicians do this sort of deliberating and strategizing so publicly, but Berkley is also the sort to call out her own party’s president when she sees him making what she views as grave missteps on Israel. Fewer still would, as Berkley did on Rosh Hashanah, empathize with an irate Jewish constituent and say that President Barack Obama has “blown it” with the Jews.

Then again, Berkley is also willing to stand at the end of her driveway in triple-digit heat waving down a tardy, lost reporter arriving for an interview and then sit him on a breakfast-bar stool to make him coffee. She serves that brew in a blue plastic mug that reads “My favorite congresswoman Shelley Berkley,” and then when I wonder what my journalist colleagues would think of me drinking from it, jokes with a dismissive wave and a cackle, “Oh, puleeze, they all have their own!”

Then, clad in a bold fuchsia suit jacket, a monochrome-swirled skirt, and black-and-white polka-dot shoes she brags she bought at DSW, she drives us away in the Ford Fusion hybrid she recently purchased to replace her gas-guzzling Cadillac. (She drives a SmartCar in D.C.)

We’re en route to Temple Beth Shalom for her aliyah, for which she’ll take out the tiny piece of gum she’s always chewing and leave it in a scrap of tissue on her seat. That seat is at the front row of the sanctuary’s second section, where worshippers must walk by her and she can schmooze.

This is her shul, the one she has belonged to since she was a 12-year-old Rochelle Levine and her parents moved her and her sister here from the Catskills to outrun her father’s gambling debts. The Levines had planned to relocate to California, but her parents were entranced by the glitter of the Strip after a detour to see the Hoover Dam, so they stayed. Las Vegas had about 130,000 residents then, and it had one synagogue.

“The first thing my father did when we got here was go down to the union hall and get a job, and the first thing my mother did was join the temple,” she recalls. It was the summer of 1963, and her dad became a waiter at the Sands Hotel-Casino.

Politics entered Berkley’s bloodstream quite early, motivated as much as anything by the tales her grandmothers relayed of the shtetls her family came from and the Nazi genocide that occurred there. “I wanted to be in a position that, God forbid anything were to happen to my people like what happened in the Holocaust, I would be in a position to help stop it,” she tells me. “When I decided to do this, I decided I was going to be a Jew who happened to be an elected official. I wear my Jewishness on my sleeve. I don’t apologize for it to anybody.”

She first became president of Las Vegas B’nai B’rith Girls, and later she was UNLV student body president. She worked on successful state assembly campaigns in 1968 for two political novices who would become U.S. senators, Reid and Richard Bryan. Berkley paid for her law degree by serving cocktails in Strip casinos, then she served a term in the state assembly and two on the board of regents before her 1998 election to Congress.

That was a heady transition. She attended the 1999 state dinner for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a breakfast for Jewish members of Congress the following morning at which Barak predicted that a peace deal would come within 18 months.

“I walked out of that breakfast thinking, ‘I’ve only been here five months. I’ve already brought peace to the Middle East,’ ” Berkley says as we sit in the Beth Shalom lobby after her aliyah. “I thought, ‘What is so difficult?’ The reality is not so easy. I remember being interviewed and telling people what happened in the breakfast, but then the peace track with Syria fell apart because Assad demanded Israel give back the Golan Heights before they would sit down. That wasn’t going to happen. Arafat continued and continued and continued until he had wrung out every concession he could make. At Camp David, Israel offered 97 percent of the West Bank, control of Gaza, control of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, and Arafat walked away, started the second Intifada.”

Those early years set the tone for Berkley’s tenure in Washington. To her, it proved that the Palestinians don’t want peace, they want the destruction of Israel, and so it is incumbent upon the United States to stand firmly beside Israeli leaders almost no matter what.

That explains her rocky relationship with the president. Berkley was a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter who endorsed Obama only after Clinton conceded the nomination and only after Obama called and pledged his support for Israel as well as his opposition to storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, one of the top local issues for Nevada.

Then she was apoplectic when the administration “drew a line that didn’t need to be drawn” by condemning West Bank settlements in May 2009. Berkley believes Obama is trying to—and can—recover, and that his performance during the flotilla crisis was “excellent,” but that there is a genuine mistrust in the activist Jewish community toward the Democratic president.

“Nothing is irretrievable,” she says, shortly after making the remark to the constituent that Obama had “blown it” with the Jews. “But right now he’s in a very bad place with the organized Jewish community.”

She’s pleased to see Rahm Emanuel depart as Obama’s chief of staff. Berkley, who chairs a semi-annual gathering of Jewish legislators from the European Union and the United States, recalls often being asked why Emanuel wasn’t doing more for the Israeli agenda. Berkley and Emanuel, former colleagues in Congress, “weren’t the closest of friends then and nothing much has changed,” she says. Meanwhile, while she faults President George W. Bush for many things during his presidency, she believes the Republican president was more personally committed to Israel than Obama.

It’s this sort of blunt talk that impresses folks like Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council now on the executive board of Christians United for Israel. The two part ways on virtually every other issue, but on this they’ve formed an unlikely friendship.

“I think she’s a leader in this regard,” says Bauer, who recalls Berkley receiving the most rousing applause of any speaker at his group’s annual convention in July from a crowd he described as “overwhelming conservative, Christian, and pro-life.” “There are other people on Capitol Hill that will privately say to their constituents, ‘Of course I’m with Israel and I’m talking to the White House behind the scenes’ to get the policy better. But she’s been willing to say it publicly. This is the way you can tell when a political figure really feels something in their heart.”

Because of her prominence on Israel, Berkley’s own constituents occasionally seem to forget how liberal she is. She supports abortion rights, same-sex marriage, the Obama stimulus efforts, and the health reform bill. On Rosh Hashanah, as she dropped in on one Jewish group after the next, several people cornered her to explain her refusal to condemn the planned Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero in New York. The Chabad rabbi was particularly upset.

“You know what also made me crazy,” Berkley retorts in a thick New York accent, still intact despite a near half-century in Nevada. “Two things. First of all, I didn’t like the fact that opponents keep calling that area ‘hallowed grounds.’ This is downtown New York. There’s a porno place, a bar, and tattoo parlor. Not exactly hallowed ground. And, number two, I’m very cognizant of the fact that we are such a small minority and I thought if a Jewish congresswoman starts condemning other religions and building where they have the right quite frankly to build, that’s going to turn around on us.”

Berkley happens to be on fairly good terms with the Muslim community in Las Vegas. A Muslim friend, Dr. Ikram Khan, played shadkhen in arranging her first date with her second husband, Dr. Larry Lehrner, and Berkley says Lehrner’s practice is half Muslim. The day after our Rosh Hashanah tour, she visited a mosque to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Aslam Abdullah, the executive director of the Islamic Society of Nevada, says he finds Berkley to be accessible, friendly, and respectful.

Accessible, indeed. This is a congresswoman who admitted to me on my “The Strip” podcast in 2006 that she missed a vote on Gulf Coast relief after Hurricane Katrina because she was recovering from plastic surgery. (Republicans reacted with a press release, which still makes her giggle.) She happily indulged the hounding cameras of TMZ.com in July 2009 on why she supported a posthumous Congressional honor for Michael Jackson because of his ties to Las Vegas. And as she walks me around her home pointing out her favorite tchochkes, we wind up in her bathroom taking stock of the framed pictures from exotic worldwide destinations she and her husband have visited.

“I love being the congresswoman from Las Vegas and a lot of the bright clothes and the bling and all,” she says. “I have an image I want to portray. I reflect the glitz and the glitter of the community I represent. And every now and then I take a step back and I just can’t believe that I am fortunate enough to be doing what I’m doing. I’m the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who couldn’t speak English, and I’m a member of the House of Representatives. I mean, how amazing is that?”

Steve Friess is a Las Vegas-based writer who blogs at VegasHappensHere.com and contributes regularly to the Daily Beast and AOL News.

• President Ahmadinejad arrives in Lebanon tomorrow even as officials there have tried to downplay the visit. [LAT]

• Excellent reporting on how New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino ended up talking to Brooklyn Hasidim in the first place. [NYT]

• Dubai police disclosed that two months ago someone who played “a key role in the killing” of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was arrested, though they won’t say for what, by whom, or what nationality he is. [Haaretz]

• Sanctions have taken a genuine toll even on Iran’s day-to-day economy. [WSJ]

• A committee-approved bill to require a national referendum for land cessions in the West Bank and the Golan still faces important opposition: From both Labor Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Likud Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin. [JPost]

• Community board approval of the Ground Zero Islamic center in May was followed (caveat: Correlation does not prove causation!) by a significant uptick in local U.S. governments’ alleged discrimination against Muslims trying to build mosques. [Ben Smith]

• Holocaust denier David Irving was denied permission to conduct a tour on the Auschwitz grounds. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Remnants of a 1500-year-old Samaritan synagogue were uncovered in the Jordan Valley. [JTA]

• The New Israel Fund has modified donation guidelines so as to try to avoid supporting groups not seen as sufficiently Zionist. [JTA]

• Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, unleashed on midtown Manhattan. Look out, ladies! [Page Six]

Mayor Bloomberg announced the winner of the Sukkah City competition. Jewcy was there.

• U.S. diplomats worry that the direct peace talks will disband over the construction freeze controversy. [Haaretz]

• Most of the 300,000 Jewish settlers would like the freeze to end so that their towns can continue to grow. [WSJ]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu had nice things to say about so many different folk. [Laura Rozen]

• An intelligence expert concludes in a new study that renewed conflict with Lebanon will cover much larger ground, perhaps expand into Syria, and maybe draw Iran explicitly in. [Haaretz]

• Left-wing Israeli group Peace Now took politicians and journalists—including, apparently, one from the Times—on a plane ride over the West Bank to show them settlement growth. [NYT]

• Egypt believes Hamas successfully smuggled rockets into Sinai and plans to launch them into southern Israel and Jordan. [Haaretz]

• Why Mideast peace might be Secretary of State Clinton’s to win or lose. [LAT]

• In a forthcoming tell-all, former Prime Minister Olmert is apparently going Nixon on Defense Minister Barak, whom he blames for ousting him from office. [Haaretz]

• Turkish President Abdullah Gul cancelled a meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres in New York (both are here this week for the U.N. General Assembly), though his pow-wow with A’jad is still on. [Haaretz]

• The U.S. plans to continue to fund and cooperate with the Lebanese Armed Forces (against columnist Lee Smith’s recommendation). [JPost]

• By contrast, Prime Minister Netanyahu reassured party members that he knows where the redlines are and he won’t cross them. [JPost]

• Abbas and Defense Minister Barak met secretly in Amman over the weekend concerning the talks. [JTA]

• The New York Times editorializes for peace, among other things calling on Netanyahu to continue to halt settlement-building. [NYT]

• With its basic security and services, the West Bank is beginning to feel like an actual state—and that may be the one advantage compared to past talks. [NYT]

• Richard Cohen argues that we are in many ways stuck in the long-settled debate of whether Israel should exist. [WP]

• And the best bit of optimism you’ll read concerning them, courtesy former U.N. Ambassador Martin Indyk. [NYT]

• Expect to see a “quiet freeze”: The construction moratorium would be permitted to expire in September, on schedule, but Bibi and Defense Minister Barak will not sign building permits. [Haaretz]

• Israel is asking Russia to halt its sale of anti-shipping missiles to Syria. [Haaretz]

• Mohamed ElBaradei, the onetime head of the U.N. nuclear inspectors, has teemed up in his native Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood in a signature drive to try to effect constitutional change. [WSJ]

• Martin Earnest Dannenberg, a Jewish U.S. counterintelligence special agent during World War II who discovered (along with a Jewish Army translator) an original copy of the Nuremberg Laws in a small German town, died at 94. [LAT]

• Seeing an opportunity in effective sanctions and technical delays, President Obama is again trying to engage Iran. [WP]

• A Polish court upheld Uri Brodsky’s extradition to Germany. Brodsky, an alleged Mossad agent, is accused of fraudulently procuring a German passport for one of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s assassins. [Haaretz]

• Diplomacy-wise, Israel and Turkey have seen far better days. Economically, they remain strong and important partners for each other. [NYT]

• A sad, panoramic sketch of the shrinking of the Dead Sea. [NYT]

• Reginald Levy, the pilot of the plane hijacked by Black September in 1972, died at 88. He received a hero’s welcome after Israeli commandos (led by Ehud Barak) stormed the plane and rescued the passengers,. [NYT]

Yesterday morning saw the biggest and deadliest Israeli-Lebanese skirmish since the 2006 war—the death toll included two Lebanese soldiers, one Lebanese journalist, and one senior Israeli reserves officer—and 36 hours later, things are nowhere near back to normal. Notably, Hezbollah forces were not directly involved; this was between Lebanon and Israel. Also notably, Lebanon started it. (Don’t believe me? Ask Stephen Walt.) The IDF has alleged that the provocation was “planned,” presumably in an effort to distract the world from the impending results of the international probe into the 2005 Syrian-backed assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Yesterday morning, Israel notified U.N. peacekeepers (UNIFIL) of the planned pruning of a cypress tree in Israeli territory but on the other side of the border fence with the aid of a crane stretching over the fence (see picture). Again, to be clear: The U.N. has reported that the tree is on the Israeli side of the Blue Line—the actual border—but on the other side of the border fence, and “Israel has every right to be on the north side of the fence” (the IDF has since occupied the zone, generally about 20 yards wide, between the fence and the border). Lebanon asked for a delay in the pruning, to which Israel agreed. All of this is run-of-the-mill: “Once a week, the army prunes bushes and trees on the border in coordination with UNIFIL, which coordinates with the Lebanese,” said an Israeli diplomatic spokesperson.

At some point, though, the Lebanese—who say the Israelis want the tree down because it is hindering their observation abilities—asserted that the tree was on Lebanese territory (Lebanon disputes parts of the U.N.-enforced Blue Line), fired warning shots, and then shot the dead Israeli commander and another Israeli soldier, who was seriously wounded. According to the IDF, the snipers aimed not at the soldiers doing the pruning but at those who appeared to be in command. Israel responded with tank artillery; Lebanon responded to that with a rocket-propelled grenade; Israel responded to that with further shelling and helicopter strikes.

“I see the Lebanese government as directly responsible for this violent provocation against Israel,” affirmed Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is convening his security cabinet today. Defense Minister Ehud Barak chimed in. A U.S. diplomatic spokesperson urged both parties to exercise “maximum restraint,” as did Jordan’s prime minister, who has volunteered to mediate.

Maybe relatedly, maybe not, before Tuesday’s conflict Lebanon had arrested a retired army colonel for allegedly spying for Israel. More clearly relatedly, Lebanon has since accused three more citizens of espionage.

Also in the category of maybe-or-maybe-not-related were the rocket from Gaza that hit Ashkelon last week and the rocket apparently fired from Egyptian Sinai that hit Eilat earlier this week. While Egypt had denied that the latter rocket, as well as another from Sinai that hit the Jordanian city of Aqaba, had originated in Egypt, an Egyptian spokesperson has since acknowledged that Hamas fired them from Sinai. Today, Netanyahu blamed those two attacks on Hamas, and instructed the group as well as Lebanon’s government: “Don’t test our determination to protect our citizens.”

As Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith reported in June, a fresh war between Israel and Lebanon/Hezbollah is generally seen as a when-not-if situation.

Clash Escalates Israeli, Lebanese Tensions [WSJ]
Peace Pruned [The Economist]
U.N. Says It Tried To Prevent Israel-Lebanon Clash [WSJ]
Bibi Slams Hamas for Eilat Attack, Vows To Strike Back [JTA]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]

• Another diplomatic dispute between them: Turkey summoned Israel’s ambassador in response to Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s comment that Turkey’s new spy chief is a “friend of Iran.” [Haaretz]

• Though it “took too long,” Israel deserves praises for cooperating with a U.N. flotilla probe, though, the New York Times worries, the panel’s mandate may be too narrow. [NYT]

• The probe’s head, former New Zealand prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, spoke about its “challenging and demanding task.” [Haaretz]

• 400 children in Israel who are essentially illegal immigrants are set for deportation, provoking a strong debate in the country. [NYT]

• Their investigation of the rocket apparently launched from Sinai yesterday demonstrates that while Israeli-Jordanian diplomatic relations have been cold, military cooperation has continued. [JPost]